What he would do, I was quite certain, was comply reluctantly with her demand. He would, effectively, have no choice. He would
go to her apartment, alone, as she demanded. Whereupon the trap would spring.
The only thing that Nadia didn’t know was that she was not only the bait, but as much a victim of the trap as Steve Coleman.
A
week before the big day, I boarded a scheduled British Airways flight from JFK to Heathrow, and checked into one of the largest
hotels in the Bayswater district of London. The need for anonymity was paramount in my choice. I needed to be a clearly verifiable
guest, but without being too familiar a face. That was where Clifford came in. Mr. Cliff Edge.
“It’s very simple,” I said, as we walked through the darkened streets of Paddington after leaving the pub on the night we
met. “I give you my key and you use my hotel room for two, maybe three nights while I’m away. There’ll be no problem with
the front desk because you won’t have to talk to them, and even if you do it’s unlikely you’ll speak to anyone who’s actually
set eyes on me for long enough to remember me.”
The story I spun him was the kind that went down well with the kind of man he was. If my wife ever made inquiries, the hotel
would verify I’d been a guest throughout the period when in fact I’d been enjoying a few nights in Paris with a girl from
my accountant’s office. I assured him that there was little chance of my wife or anyone else trying to call me, but just in
case the phone did ring he was to ignore it but pick up any messages and give them to me when I returned. For this service
I would give him two and a half thousand up front, and the other half afterward.
As a secondary precaution, I made sure that my passport in the name of George Daly remained in the hotel’s main safe, along
with two or three other valuables and my travelers’ checks, throughout the whole period I was away. Then, using my Larry Hart
passport, I took a TWA flight back to New York.
Nadia knew all about my trip to London, but not all the details or the real reason for it. I told her I had to set up an account
into which my wife would pay the money that Steve would get out of her to buy Nadia’s silence. Naturally, I said, I would
be back for D-Day, though I had little doubt that she could perfectly well take care of herself when Steve came over. One
of the things I admired about her was that she didn’t know the meaning of fear—any more than she did of guilt, shame, or moral
repugnance. But I promised her I would be there—not actually in the room, of course, but somewhere in the apartment, and with
a gun in case of trouble.
Steve behaved exactly as predicted when she called him at his office. She was put through right away, but he sounded guarded.
She told him she had to see him urgently.
“I’m tied up right now, Nadia. Can’t you tell me on the phone what this is about?”
“I think you’d rather I didn’t do that, Steve.”
“What d’you mean?”
“For one thing, we don’t know who could be listening in, do we?”
She shot a big wink to where I sat with an extension to my ear and my hand over the mouthpiece. I winked back.
He gave a practiced laugh, though I could detect an underlying unease in it. “If it’s all that important, come to the office.”
“No. You come here, to the apartment.”
“I really don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“Steve, I’m not arguing with you. I’m telling you what you’re going to do.”
“Nadia, what is this… ?
She began subtly turning the thumbscrews with talk of campaign funds, coupled with the use of the term “avoidable scandal.”
His voice took on a harder edge as anger took over from uncertainty. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Nadia—and neither
do you. Whatever your game is, I’m not playing. If you want to see me, come to the office. I’m sorry, but I’m going to have
to hang up now.”
“How’s Sara?”
A fatal pause. She waved her fist in triumph; she knew she had him.
“Sara?”
“Not on the phone, Steve—right? Let’s say seven-thirty at the apartment. Come alone, drive yourself. You know where you can
park.”
He protested some more, but he knew he had no choice. She managed to imply that this was a once and for all deal, some kind
of compensation for the fact that he’d lied when he left her, and that he had not in fact been planning to save his marriage
but had taken up with a new mistress. She refused to tell him how she knew this, but hinted she might reveal her sources once
the business between them was over.
I watched his arrival from the corner of Nadia’s building where I had a clear view of the whole street. I was satisfied that
he was alone. No other cars cruised suspiciously by or parked at around the same time. I saw him walk toward the building,
coat collar turned up and hands deep in his pockets. There was no doorman, so visitors either had to use a key or be buzzed
in. Nadia had established on the phone that Steve still had the set of keys she’d given him, which made my job easier. Otherwise,
I would have had to wait in the apartment to buzz him in, then leave the door on the latch and make my getaway down the back
stairs before he stepped out of the elevator.
As it was, I already stood across from where he’d parked his car. In my hand I had the pair of pantyhose with which, ten minutes
earlier, I had strangled Nadia. I let enough time pass, a minute maybe, until Steve would be in the elevator on his way up
to her floor. Then, checking there was no casual pedestrian close enough to see what I was doing, I crossed over and carefully
snagged the pantyhose on the edge of his front fender. I paused only to ensure that enough fibers were torn and caught where
they would readily be found later, then continued innocently on my way, slipping the pantyhose into a plastic bag in my pocket.
It was possible I might need to plant them somewhere later in order to make the case against Steve conclusive, though I thought
probably not. All the same, I meant to leave as little as possible to chance.
Two hours later, Larry Hart boarded his return flight to London, where Clifford was paid off. Everything had gone perfectly
to plan. When the news of Steve’s arrest was piped by satellite to the TV set in my hotel room, I picked up the phone and
called Sara. Then I called Heathrow, upgraded my return BA flight (in the name of George Daly) to Concorde, and set off once
more across the Atlantic.
On the way I thought through for the thousandth time everything that had happened, looking for the flaws that might conceivably
still show up. Although I knew now that Steve had panicked and run when he had found Nadia’s body, even if he’d done the decent
thing and called the cops, he would still have emerged as the prime suspect. The whole backstory of his affair with her, the
carefully planted clues I’d left around the apartment, the nylon fibers on his fender—all these things would have made a very
hard case for him to answer. The best perception of him would have been as a man who committed murder in a moment of panic,
then tried to remove all the evidence implicating himself, but crucially missing some, then finally attempting the classic
trick where the killer tries to establish his innocence by calling the police and pretending to have discovered the body.
It wouldn’t have worked. Whether he ran or stayed put, his goose was cooked.
All the same, it wasn’t over yet. So far as Sara was concerned, everything went as I’d foreseen. But I knew there would be
inquiries about me by lawyers working for Steve’s defense. I was as ready for them as I could be. I had calculated—rightly
as it turned out—that a lawyer with political ambitions would have many potential enemies. I was far from being the only suspect.
The biggest risk I ran was that somehow my relationship with Nadia would become known. If that happened, I could find myself
in big trouble. Should that become a risk, then Larry Hart was poised to fly to some unextraditable territory in South America
or one of several other continents that I had on my list of emergency hideouts.
A secondary risk was that the connection between myself and the detective agency that Nadia had worked for might be discovered.
It was no more than a remote risk so long as nothing about Steve’s affair with Sara came out into the open. But if the liaison
between Steve Coleman and Sara Daly became known, then George Daly’s connection with the firm for which Nadia had worked would
surely surface. However, I was as prepared as I could be for that. Sara had seen my “shock” when I had read in the paper that
Steve’s victim had worked for a detective agency. I would explain that I hadn’t told her about my own connection with that
agency because it had struck me as yet another “weird coincidence.” A man with something to hide would have suppressed even
that little show of surprise I had so carefully put on for her to see. In retrospect, it would have tended to suggest my innocence.
Investigators called on me, of course, as I had foreseen. Not cops: men working for Steve’s defense. They were polite and
careful in their approach. It was clear that Steve had told them about Sara, but with the injunction that the matter was not
to be brought into the open unless absolutely necessary. The fact that I could prove I’d been in London when Nadia was murdered
effectively took me out of the frame of suspicion, as I had intended it should. Everything was just fine—until Clifford Edge
called me.
Clifford had gotten my address and phone number from someone at my hotel in London—some grasping palm greased by a fifty,
I imagine. His sleazy loser’s instincts were perhaps sharper than I had anticipated. I wasn’t clear what he suspected, but
it was obviously something more than my story about a suspicious wife and a dirty weekend in Paris. Whatever I was up to,
Clifford thought there should be more money in it for him than he’d been paid so far.
I acquiesced with grace, and even, I must say, proud of my presence of mind, some humor. “Cliff,” I said, “you’re as smart
as a whip and a credit to my choice of you as a partner. I think I may have a big opportunity for a man like you. I’m going
to be over in a couple of days, and you and I are going to talk some serious business.”
So it was that Larry Hart made one final trip to England. Cliff and I met in a pub in Shepherd’s Bush. I had rented a car
and told him that I needed him to drive down with me to the coast. I hinted at import-export deals, with a knowing wink that
spoke of contraband and easy money. I told him I had friends from overseas I wanted him to meet; he would be my man in the
United Kingdom. It was an offer he couldn’t refuse.
I had a bottle of scotch in the car, and it wasn’t hard persuading him to drink most of it. If they autopsied him, they would
find enough alcohol in his system to make a verdict of accidental death a certainty. Nobody was going to make waves about
the loss of a sad case like Cliff Edge, just jokes about his name and the circumstances of his departure from this life.
As I said, another coincidence.
Once they start, for whatever reason, they come thick and fast.
T
he first thing I did when I got back to New York was destroy my passport—the one in the name of Larry Hart. I also had to
get rid of all the other evidence that George had unearthed of my existence, including the childhood photographs and everything
connected with my adoptive parents. As long as that stuff was still around, I was potentially at risk. I burned everything
in a steel wastebasket, then flushed the ashes down the toilet. It was the only way. Because you can hide things, put them
in safe places, forget about them—but there’s always a lingering risk that ten years on somebody will tear up the cellar where
you buried the body. Or you’ll forget you hid a secret copy of some crucial letter in your desk—until after you’ve sent it
to the sale room. People make dumb mistakes, and people includes yourself. That’s something I never forget.
I had very nearly made a couple of seriously dumb mistakes with Sara earlier. The worst had been that night in the Berkshires
when I was planning to kill her, the night when she’d arrived and told me she was in love with somebody else and was leaving
me. I’d almost lost it then. I grabbed her by the wrist and began dragging her toward the stairs, and only stopped when Steve
Coleman appeared in the door. It wasn’t that I was afraid of him. It just made me ask myself what I thought I was doing. The
plan had been to push her off the tower quietly and with no fuss, because she would be unconscious already. I would merely
have to ensure that she was dead after the fall, and rectify the situation if she wasn’t, then call for help. I would have
said she went up to the tower alone, and since I had not been responsible for the building work up there I could hardly be
accused of setting a trap for her. Which of course I hadn’t. That much would be plain.
As for proving I had pushed her, there was no way. It was my word that I was downstairs the whole time against the word of
anyone who chose to challenge me. Unprovable.
So what was I doing trying to drag her to her death in full view of Steve Coleman? It meant I would have to kill him too.
And that would be hard to explain.
I pulled myself together and did what I could to salvage the situation. I’ve always suspected I had something of the actor
in me, and at that moment I proved it. I went straight into humble, unselfish George mode. I’d picked up enough of what people
thought about him by then. I knew how humble, unselfish, dick-brain George would have behaved. I went on behaving like that
for the following days and weeks.
The performance stood me in good stead. When everything collapsed under her, I was the only person Sara could turn to. I’d
been in on her secret, and I’d kept it. Good old humble, unselfish George. Loyal as a favorite dog. Trustworthiness itself.
The whole thing had played like a dream.
Throughout it all—the setting up of Nadia’s murder, Steve’s arrest, Sara’s trauma—I had continued reading George’s notebooks.
I found they gave me a more useful insight into who he was than anything else could have. He had a weird kind of mind, somehow
turned in on itself, forever looking for “the still point of the turning world,” as he put it—whatever he meant by that. He
said he’d touched it sometimes in meditation.