Текст книги "A Shock to the System "

Автор книги: Richard Stevenson

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"He might not have mentioned Bierly's name. I forget. But to me it was as plain as the nose on your face."

"Did Paul say where he kept the photos?"

"Why would he tell me?"

"Did he say whether there were extra copies, or negatives?"

"We didn't go into it. I wasn't the least bit interested. I told Paul I thought the whole thing was dangerous and ridiculous and dumb, and he ought to have his head examined."

"Then why, Phyllis, if you tried to discourage Paul from blackmailing someone—someone who probably murdered Paul to get hold of the incriminating photos and to silence him—why, then, do you say you are partly responsible for his death?"

Looking desolate, she said, almost inaudibly, "Because the last time I saw Paul, he asked me for the money one last time. He didn't want to be a blackmailer like his father, he said."

"And?"

"I refused. I told him I would only give him the money if he went back to Crockwell."

"Oh."

She gazed over at me out of her ruined face. "If I had given Paul the money—he'd still be alive."

"This is possible."

"He'd still be queer, but at least he wouldn't be dead. There'd be hope for Paul."

I said, "Why didn't you tell me this before? On Wednesday, you left this crucial information, about the blackmail, out of your story of what happened, Phyllis."

She looked at me hopelessly. She said, "It was too touchy. I hate all this. I just hate it."

"I guess so."

"With the Haigs, blackmail is a touchy subject."

"It sounds that way," I said. "Phyllis, I think you owe it to your son's memory to do what you can to see that the killer is caught and convicted."

"I suppose so."

"I'm going to continue to investigate. You can either pay me or not pay me, that's up to you. But I'll need your help."

"All right. All right, all right. Shit."

"Paul may have confided in Glen Snyder while he was in therapy during the six weeks before he died," I said. "Snyder is probably still under the impression that Paul committed suicide. I want your permission to interview Snyder and lay out the evidence that Paul was murdered, and I want you to urge Snyder to tell me anything relevant that Paul confided to him during those six weeks. It's unlikely Paul would have discussed the actual blackmail with Dr. Snyder—that's a crime, after all. But he could well have talked about activities of his own that would have provided him with the information—and the photos—that he ended up using in the blackmail attempt. Will you do that?"

Suddenly exhausted, she put her drink aside and laid her cigarette in an ashtray full of butts, several smoldering. She was starting to nod off. She said, "I'll do what I can. But I don't think I can pay you. You charge an arm and a leg, you know, and I'm going to have to paint the house this summer."

"We can talk about that later, Phyllis." I meant when she was

sober, provided I could locate a window of opportunity.

Blinking and trying to remain conscious, she said, "How the hell did all this crazy shit happen?"

After a moment, I said it probably went way back. But by then she had begun to snore.

20

I managed to get Larry Bierly on the phone at Albany Med. He said, "There are no pictures."

"But Paul told his mother there are."

"But I'm telling you there are no pictures. And anyway, Strachey, you are completely off base."

I said, "Where are Paul's personal belongings?"

"I've got some, Phyllis has some, and a lot we gave away."

"I'd like to have a look at what you've got. If there's nothing there, there's nothing there. But humor me in this, Larry."

"No, I will not. I'm telling you, Strachey, it's all a waste of time, what you're doing. Just drop it. It's not worth it."

"After Paul died and you went into his apartment, was there any indication the place had been searched?"

A little silence. "I don't think so. But I do know this for sure: there are no pictures."

"Pictures of what?"

"I can't tell you. If I could, I would. But it has nothing to do with Paul's death—that I am one hundred percent certain of. Why the fuck can't you just take my word about this, Strachey?"

"But Larry, if you know exactly what I'm talking about that there are no pictures of, and if it's so sensitive a subject that you refuse to tell me about it, then why couldn't Paul have tried to blackmail someone with this information and that person killed him to shut him up?"

Bierly said nothing, but I could hear him breathing, and I thought I could almost, but not quite, hear him thinking.

I said, "Could Paul have been blackmailing Emil Provost?"

"Who?"

"Steven St. James's gentleman friend."

No response.

I said, "Did it have anything to do with drugs?"

Another silence.

"Two members of the therapy group told me you and Paul used to argue about his alcohol intake and your regular use of recreational street drugs, namely acid and Ecstasy. Were drugs involved in the blackmail situation or actions?"

"Shit!" he said, and his phone came crashing down.

With the dial tone I now had, I considered calling him again but decided instead to let him cool off. After all, he wasn't going anywhere.

Crockwell still wasn't answering his phone, and neither was Steven St. James. I did reach Phyllis Haig, who by late afternoon was up and around again. She remembered the gist of our conversation and said she'd call Dr. Glen Snyder in Ballston Spa and give her okay for him to talk to me about Paul and his brief course of therapy with Snyder in February and March. I told her to emphasize to Snyder that it now seemed likely Paul had not committed suicide—no therapist likes the idea of a patient in his or her care rejecting life and the world and the therapist—and that murder was more likely. An hour later, Snyder called me and said he could talk to me Monday evening at eight if I'd drive up to his Ballston Spa office. I said I would.

Timmy and I dined at the new Vietnamese place on Madison, and I told him about my visit with Phyllis Haig, her confirmation of my suspicions about blackmail and her revelation about incriminating photographs.

"This is getting pretty racy," he said.

"Why 'racy'? That's a term with sexual connotations."

"I don't know. It's just that blackmail photos are often sexual."

"But it's hard to imagine the parties involved in this—the ones St. James said I 'don't want to know' what they were up to together—combining for anything sexual. Not Crockwell, anyway.

The others conceivably, but not the cure-a-fag high priest of the Hudson Valley. Of course, Emil Provost still looks like an ideal candidate for sexual blackmail—old-crust family man and all that."

"So you still think that old guy who goes around in a smoking jacket in the middle of May, and who probably couldn't find his way around Albany without a chauffeur and a valet, drove up alone to Albany in March and somehow got Paul Haig alone in his apartment and forced him to drink a bottle of Scotch laced with enough Elavil to kill him? Don, it's farfetched."

I said, "Maybe St. James was in on it. He helped."

"That's a little more plausible."

"It's one of the possibilities I might ask St. James about. I'm going to take a chance and drive down there after dinner. St. James ought to be resting at home tonight after a long day at the animal farm. Do you want to come along?"

"I'll pass. But good luck. You'd better take some Mace along, in case those wild dogs are on the loose again."

"I'll just use psychology. Like we did yesterday."

"In case he asks, who are you going to tell St. James your client is on this case?"

"Good question, Timothy. It will give me something to think about on the way down—and on the way back too, if I have to."

WAMC had pushed back the Sunday-night jazz shows yet another half-hour to make way for a program of Irish music—not Irish drama, mind you, or Irish literature, but Irish music. What was next, Irish cuisine? Heading down the thruway, I played an old Horace Silver tape. The road was still wet in spots, but the sky had cleared and stars were breaking out across the purple dusk. Traffic was heavy with weekenders heading back to the city. The flow slowed to a crawl in spots on account of bridge reconstruction. Bridge rebuilding had been popular in New York State since the collapse of a thruway span in the eighties killed several motorists—though when Senate Republicans complained of high construction costs, Timmy said maybe they could just put up

signs along certain stretches of the thruway that said "Falling Bridge Zone."

I pulled into St. James's parking area at nine-ten next to his old Rabbit. Lights were on in his little house. I walked up to his front door and knocked.

St. James opened the door in the company of the two snuffling dogs, who came at me sniffing and licking.

"Hi, Steven, I'm Don Strachey, and I'm a private investigator. We met on Friday at Albany Med."

"I remember you. My landlord said you came here yesterday. How did you even know where I lived?" He looked alarmed but not panic-stricken. Just out of the shower, apparently, he was barefoot in jeans and a white T-shirt. Auburn hair curled up out of the neck of his shirt in the front and down over his neck in the back. He looked nice and smelled good, the same cologne as the other day.

I said, "I'd like to talk to you about a case of blackmail involving Paul Haig, you, Emil Provost, Larry Bierly and Vernon Crockwell. Have you got a few minutes?"

He took this in with what looked like fear mixed with bewilderment. But there was no indication he felt cornered and might try to bolt.

"I can't believe this," was all he said, as he shook his head. "I just can't believe this."

"You can't believe what?"

"That I'm being dragged into—whatever I'm being dragged into. Did they find out who shot Larry?"

"Not yet."

"I called him at the hospital yesterday. I had to work and I couldn't get up to see him. I asked Larry about you, and he did say he knew you. But he said he didn't think you would bother me, and if you did I shouldn't give you the time of day. So—no. No, you can't come in. I'm sorry."

"Look," I said, "it's either me or the Albany cops. Take your pick. Believe me, I'm preferable. I could go to them and tell them all I know about you and Emil and Larry and Paul and all of it, and

let them apply their customary thumbscrews. From me, though, you might get a little understanding or even sympathy. Unless, of course, you don't deserve it."

St. James looked aghast, the desired effect, and the panic I saw in him in the hospital parking lot was staring to show up again in his eyes. Finally, he shook his head once, as if to make me disappear, and when he saw that I hadn't, he said, "I guess we'd better sit down."

I followed him inside, and when the dogs kept at me, St. James said, "Mike—Bob—lay down."

I said, "Your dogs aren't named after opera characters."

"Oh, no. No, they're not."

"Good for you."

"Mike is named after Michelangelo, and Bob is named for Robert Taylor, the actor and for many years Barbara Stanwyck's husband."

"Ah."

"A former roommate named them."

I sat on the couch and St. James sat across from me in an easy chair in front of the bookshelves I'd seen the day before through the window. The books were mostly on zoology and animal husbandry, but one section was devoted to Hollywood bios.

I said, "I guess you can change roommates, but you can't change your dogs' names."

"You can change dogs' names," St. James said, "if you do it gradually over time—there's no harm in it. But I really don't see any reason to." Mike and Bob lay on the rug on either side of St. James, peering over at me and emitting fluids in various states.

"Steven," I said, "it's time to fess up."

He stared at me. "You said something about Emil, and about blackmail. What on earth does that mean?"

"I think that's something you need to tell me."

He kept staring and was starting to sweat. He was going to need a fresh T-shirt. "I just don't get it, is all that I'm saying. What does Emil have to do with it?"

I said, "There are pictures—photographs."

"There are?"

"Paul Haig had them."

"But who took the pictures? And what does Emil have to do with it all?"

I said, "Are you telling me Emil wasn't involved?"

"Of course not. Don't be ridiculous."

"This would be easier to sort out," I said, "and a lot less confusing for everybody concerned if I knew what the hell it is we are talking about, Steven. On Friday, I asked you what you and Crockwell and Bierly and Haig were mixed up in together, and you said, quote, 'You don't want to know.' But I do. Because it now appears that Paul was trying to blackmail one of the participants in the you-don't-want-to-know business, and he may well have been murdered in order to halt the blackmail and shut him up. Neither Bierly nor Crockwell has yet explained to me what was going on among you, so it's up to you to break the logjam. Either that or the lot of you are likely to be hauled in by the Albany Police Department, which will read you your Miranda rights and then start peeling your skin off in strips—figuratively speaking, of course, though you'll hardly notice the difference."

He was shaking his head again, not in denial but in apparent disbelief. "This is incredible. I never wanted to do it in the first place. It wasn't my idea. But I was high and I just—went along."

"Along with what?"

"We did something that I knew was wrong."

"Uh-huh."

"We'd never have done it if we hadn't been flying high. I know that's no excuse."

"No, it never is."

"But there was nobody to say, Wait a minute, no, this is crazy, it's cruel, it's torture, it's—illegal. We were all under the influence—a terrible, terrible mistake."

"You and Paul and Larry and—?"

"The three of us."

"No Emil?"

He laughed once. "God, no. Emil? Where did you get an idea like that?"

I could no longer remember. I said, "I'm not sure. But aren't you—involved with him? Look, I'm gay and you don't have to hold back. I'm hip to these things."

"Oh, well, I'm glad you're hip," St. James said, with a Mellors-like sneer. "I knew you were gay—Larry told me—but I didn't know you were hip too. That makes this whole thing so much easier."

I said, "So you and Emil aren't an occasional item?"

" 'An occasional item.' Such a sensitive way of putting it, Strachey. No, we're not. Emil happens to be in love with me. He sometimes imagines that I'm in love with him—which I'm not– and that I hold my passions in check because he's married and because of class differences. But it's all in his head. I haven't done a thing to either lead him on or to make him believe I'm abstaining from sex with him for any reason other than that I don't happen to be interested. I do like him—he's a sweet old guy from another age who's as gay as I am but who grew up differently and who's trying to find a way to be true to his sexual nature, but can't. Sometimes I wish I was attracted to him, because he's a decent man and deserves better. But I'm not attracted, and our relationship exists entirely within Emil's fantasy life—which is real enough to him that he's powerfully jealous of the other men in my life, real and imagined."

I said, "I misunderstood the situation. Sorry."

"Oh, no problem, no problem at all. God."

"So Emil wasn't involved in—'it.' Who was?"

"I told you. Larry and Paul and I. And of course Dr. Crockwell."

"Right." I waited. He looked at me and said nothing, his scent becoming Mellors-like again.

"Paul and Larry were very, very angry," he said tightly. "Especially Larry."

"At Crockwell."

He nodded.

"So?"

St. James started breathing hard. "I think—I think I could go to prison for this," he said.

"You all got high and you did something to Crockwell?"

He nodded.

"Which was?"

He said, "I—I can't tell you."

"Why?"

"We all swore we'd never tell."

"Even Crockwell?"

"Especially Crockwell. He said he'd never press charges if we all kept our mouths shut."

"Jesus, did you rape him?"

Now he grimaced. "God, no! What kind of people do you think we are?"

"The kind that could go to prison for whatever you did do. You just said so, Steven."

"Yes, but—no, I would never do a thing like that. And neither would Paul or Larry, even though they despised Crockwell. Especially Larry."

"Is Larry an old friend of yours?"

"Not old, but good. We met in a bar in Albany when Paul and Larry were having some hard times on account of Paul's drinking. We slept together once in a while, especially after Larry moved out and had his own apartment. We turned on together occasionally, and one time we ran into Paul when he was drunk and he joined us. And that's when it happened. One Thursday night in January when they knew Crockwell would be alone in his office. They started talking about Crockwell, and they got angrier and angrier about what he does to gay people and what he did to them, and that's when Larry got this idea about how to get even."

He sat there breathing hard again, the wet circles under his arms as big as grapefruits now. He started to speak several times, but each time nothing came out. For a minute, I thought he might faint.

After another minute, I said, "Am I going to have to ask Crockwell what happened?"

Still breathing erratically, St. James nodded. "You can ask him. But I don't think he'll tell you."

"You realize, Steven, that there may be blackmail involved, and murder. You may be obstructing justice, a felony in itself."

Looking bewildered again, he said, "You keep saying that, but I don't understand it at all. Who would blackmail any of us? The only people who know about the incident are me, Larry and Dr. Crockwell. Paul wouldn't have blackmailed Larry, I can't imagine. And he didn't try to blackmail me. And even if he had tried to blackmail Crockwell, Crockwell would have just said, 'Okay, tell the world. Then you'll go to prison for what you did.' So why would Paul do that?"

"Maybe," I said, "Crockwell’s reputation was at stake, and that meant more than anything to him, and so Paul knew he was vulnerable."

"That's possible," St. James said. "But Crockwell could have just said to Paul, 'Tell anybody you want. I'll just deny the whole thing. You're just a disgruntled former patient who went over the edge, and you're a drunken sexual pervert nobody will believe.' And anyway, Strachey, where did you get the idea that there are pictures? Nobody was taking pictures, I can tell you that for sure. I know, because I was there."

St. James seemed to be breathing more evenly and sweating a little less now, though his dogs were slobbering up a storm. I felt like getting down on the floor and slobbering too. It seemed as though I had systematically eliminated all useful knowledge pertaining to Paul Haig's death and that I was nearly all the way back to my state of useless innocence of five days earlier.

I said, "Steven, unless you can find it within yourself to be more forthcoming with me on exactly what happened in Crockwell's office that night, I do believe that I'll have no choice but to go to the Albany police and relay to them the admissions you have made to me here tonight."

St. James's fist came down on the end table next to him, causing the lamp on it to jump and the dogs to leap into the air and come down snarling. I left soon after.

21

Late Sunday night, back on Crow Street, barely un-bitten by dogs and still bordering on the desperate, I considered how the precious little I had left to go on was Vernon Crockwell himself. Vengeance had been done to him—"tortured" was one word St. James had used—and it was so awful (so humiliating?) that Crockwell didn't dare report the incident, even though it was a crime, an imprisonable offense.

So Haig had tried to blackmail Crockwell? And Crockwell, whose reputation was everything to him, killed Haig? And tried to kill Bierly? And did that mean St. James was next? I'd forgotten to warn him. Though all that seemed less and less likely now anyway. Approached with a blackmail attempt, Crockwell probably would simply have told Haig to buzz off. And Bierly, of course, had been telling me all along that I was off base and on the wrong track connecting the St. James-Haig-Bierly-Crockwell incident to Haig's death, or even to any blackmail attempt at all. Yet Bierly did try to implicate Crockwell himself in Haig's death. That's what he had tried to hire me to prove.

Timmy was asleep when I climbed into bed, and I wanted to chew it all over with him. But he needed his rest on account of working for a living, unlike me, so I lay for some hours going over it in my mind and awaiting a blinding insight. But by three a.m. , the last time I checked the clock, the only thing I had produced was some drool on the pillow.

Monday morning, first thing, I called Crockwell's machine—I had nowhere else to turn until after I met with Paul Haig's Ballston

Spa psychiatrist that evening—and left this message: "Hi, Vernon, Don Strachey here. I know about your evening with Bierly and Haig and Steven St. James in January. You have my sympathy, but we do need to talk. You talk to me, or I talk to Al Finnerty. Take your choice. Call me."

Timmy, just out of the shower, said, 'You were a little bit abrupt with Group Commander Crockwell. What was that about?"

I described my evening with Steven St. James and its tantalizing, incomplete revelations.

Timmy said, "I wonder what they did to him. Do you think they could have raped him or something? That's what it sounds like."

"St. James says no, they'd never do a vicious thing like that. Anyway, rapists tend to have histories of being violent, and none of these guys do, that I know of."

"I'll bet it had something to do with their being gay, though, and the psychotherapy group. Let the punishment fit the crime."

"Whatever it is, Crockwell is apparently so determined to keep it from coming out that he'll risk being charged with Bierly's shooting, or even Paul Haig's murder."

"You're not still planning on ruining Crockwell, are you? Even if he wasn't mixed up in Haig's death or Bierly's shooting? It does sound as if he may have suffered enough."

"Suffered, yes, but he's still operating his rotten, destructive business. Anyway, no. I'm beginning to suspect that there may be ways other than ruination to remove Vernon T. Crockwell as a social menace."

"Just to be on the safe side, maybe you'd better run those ideas by me first."

He ambled by me, naked, en route to his outfit-of-the-day, nicely laid out the night before across his personal ironing board.

"Maybe I will run my ideas by you, or maybe I'll just run them up your leg. Like this."

He hated being late for work, but once in a while he made an exception. He hopped off the bed half an hour later, reshowered, and sped off to the office of Assemblyman Myron R. Lipshutz

(D-New York City), for whom Timmy was chief legislative aide. And I drifted off and slept till one. It was lucky I woke up then, for I had slept through a call from Vernon Crockwell. His message on my machine said he could see me at three in his office, and I called his machine immediately to confirm the appointment.

"I hope you're not going to mention this perfectly idiotic blackmail business to the police, Donald. It will just fuel their misguided suspicions that I was involved in Larry Bierly's shooting or even Paul Haig's death. My attorney has managed to convince the district attorney that the evidence against me is entirely circumstantial and it's obvious that someone who doesn't care for me or my principles is attempting to frame me. But the blackmail idea will only get the police stirred up again, and that would be to the advantage of no one except the vicious deviant who is behind all of this."

"But Vernon," I said, "what we've finally come up with is a powerful and entirely plausible motive for Paul Haig's murder. Blackmail makes sense. And Paul's mother says he admitted to her—rubbed her nose in it, actually—that that's what he was attempting just before he died: the blackmail of somebody with enough money to pull Paul back from the brink of bankruptcy."

Crockwell sniffed. He was seated across his desk from me before his framed certificates in normalcy studies and his library of sexual normaliana. Both his hands were up within sight, a sign maybe that I had earned a degree of trust.

He said, "But I was not the person Paul was blackmailing. I repeat, I was not the person Paul was blackmailing. Once again: I was not the person Paul was blackmailing. Can you grasp what I am saying, Donald?"

"Yes, Vernon, but the question remains, Were you the person Paul was blackmailing?"

He wasn't used to this, it was obvious. One hand went back down behind his desk, and I doubted he was reaching for his checkbook. He said, "Donald, you obviously have nothing to

offer me in this matter, or to the cause of truth. I agreed to see you today only because you claim to have some information about me that you seem to think I may consider embarrassing. I suppose you think you're blackmailing me. Perhaps that's it—perhaps you are involved in some type of odious blackmail scheme."

"That's a whole new slant, Vernon. Maybe it's me I should be sniffing around. You're a genius."

"Well, you'll not blackmail me."

"What was it like?" I said gravely, and watched him.

He reddened and looked away. After a moment, he said, "Well, what do you think it was like, Donald?"

"They did it right here in your own office?"

"Of course. The equipment is here."

And I thought, Oh, the equipment, yes, the equipment. I said, "It was a Thursday night, right, Vernon? So Paul and Larry both knew you would be here alone."

"Yes." He was unable to look at me.

Now the question was, Who or what had they tried to turn him on to? I said, "Did they bring their own—what? Photos? Slides?"

He glanced at me quickly and seemed to relax a degree or two, as if I had missed something critical and especially humiliating. He said, "Steven St. James provided the slides."

Of course. Mellors. I remembered a visit Timmy and I had made to the Hudson Valley Game Farm several years earlier with Timmy's sister and her children. Recollections of the petting zoo came flooding back.

I said, "What were the the pictures of? Sheep?"

Crockwell shuddered violently once, then gave me a despairing little nod.

"They tied you up? Gagged you?"

"Yes," he squeaked.

"They wired you into your own setup—where is it, down the hall, behind those closed doors?"

"Yes."

"They wired you into your own Frankenstein's lab setup for zapping the bejesus out of men when they respond sexually to

other men, and they—what? Zapped you when slides of Playboy bunnies came on and then they shut off the juice when slides of sheep came on?"

Now he looked up at me desperately. "Female sheep," he bleated.

"Well, sure. They knew you weren't a pervert."

"No. No, the whole thing could have been worse." At this, he quickly looked away, and I began to wonder.

I said, "It was a brutal thing for them to have done to you, Vernon. Whatever foul deeds you may have committed against gay men in that room over the years, none of it was as vicious as what was done to you by Bierly, Haig, and St. James on that night last January."

"No, no. You can't even begin to understand what it was like, Donald."

"But were you . . . ? You know."

"Was I what?"

"Weren't you turned on, Vernon, just a little?"

"Of course not!" he snapped.

"My God, Vernon," I said, "do you mean to tell me that your system doesn't work? That in fact you can't change a man's sexual orientation with dirty pictures and electrodes and lightning storms? Wait till this gets out."

"Don't be absurd. Sexual reparative therapy using aversion techniques requires dozens of hours over a long period of time to achieve lasting results. Moreover, having intercourse with a sheep is not a natural human desire."

"I've heard from friends who grew up on farms that it can be quite pleasant, though."

Being a town boy, I guessed, Crockwell just glared.

I said, "Why didn't you call the police? After they left, I mean. How long did this go on, anyway?"

"From 10:40 p.m. until 1:45 a.m. It was endless, endless."

"I'm sure it was, Vernon. You must have been both mortified and terrified. What was done to you was a felonious criminal assault. So, why didn't you have the three of them prosecuted?"

He glowered and even shook a little. "Can you imagine the– the television coverage of such a trial?"

"Yes, I can."

"I would have been a laughingstock. My patients would have—lost confidence in me."

"It's like the old joke," I said. "A man running for sheriff in Texas wants to spread the rumor that his opponent fucks pigs. A campaign worker says, 'Why do that? It's not true.' 'No, it isn't,' the candidate says, 'but let's make him deny it.' Just being mentioned in a conversation about bestiality is bad for business, and being mentioned in this regard every night at six and eleven between the killer-mom stories and the Lotto drawing would pretty much end a man's professional usefulness in Albany, I would guess. I can understand your reticence, Vernon—although I'm not sure I would have been so forbearing in the matter myself. In fact, I'd have been left with feelings that were downright murderous."

He said, "Of course you would. I had such feelings too. I'm only human."

"But you didn't act on those feelings, Vernon?"

"No, Donald," he said. "I am not a murderer." He looked me in the eye when he said it, and he looked to me as if he either was telling the truth or was a total psychopath.

"You say Haig never tried to blackmail you. What would you have done, Vernon, if he had? What if Paul had come to you and said, 'Pay me sixty thousand dollars or I'll spread pictures around of you involved in what will look to a lot of people like some kind of ritual involving sadomasochistic bestiality'?"

"I'd have told him to take his sordid business elsewhere. First, there are no pictures. No one had a camera that night. Second, if Paul had spread the story of the incident, I would simply have denied it."

"That would have damaged your campaign for sheriff, Vernon."

"I wasn't running for sheriff, Donald. I'm a respected psycho-

therapist and Paul Haig was an alcoholic and a sexual deviant. In any case, I can't imagine Paul Haig attempting to blackmail me by threatening to make public an incident in which his—not mine but his—involvement was criminal."