by Jane Haddam
I tapped ash into the ashtray and sighed. “Well,” I said, “no Courtney Feinberg is a start in the right direction. What are you two doing here?”
“Keeping you sane at that party,” Nick said.
“Well, I’ll probably need that.”
“We thought you would. And we got here. But the weather’s awful, and since Adrienne says she can change in the ladies’ room—”
“Change into what?”
“I bought her a new party dress. A jumper thing. That kind of material Phoebe always wears. Adrienne’s is—”
“Old rose,” Adrienne said from the background.
“God,” Nick said. “I had no idea children’s clothes were so expensive.”
I stared at the ceiling and contemplated serious liquor, right in the middle of the afternoon. That was another thing about Adrienne and Courtney Feinberg. Left without proper supervision, they tended to drift to the Miss Dior section of the children’s department.
“Anyway,” Nick said. “I’ve got the address, I thought we’d go right over to that store. We’ve only got the one overnight bag. Gail can store it behind a desk for us or something. She must have a desk.”
“I’m sure she does,” I said.
“So. We’ll see you there. It’s a good thing we came, anyway. I’ve got a couple of things I want to talk over with you.”
“What things?”
“McKenna, trust me. I can’t explain on the phone. Things have been weird. You got a letter from the IRS that doesn’t make any sense at all. David’s disappeared. It’s been crazy.”
“Wait,” I said.
“See you in an hour,” Nick said.
“Nick,” I said.
The phone went to dial tone in my hand.
I stared at the receiver for a moment and then slammed it into the cradle.
At the vanity table, Jon Lowry arranged his face in an expression of polite obliviousness and folded his hands in his lap. I’d never seen a man fold his hands in his lap before. He reminded me of the punks you see on buses in London. They look like exactly the sort of people you’d run a mile from if you met them on the street in New York, and they’re all as polite as good little boys being shown off at a grandmother’s tea party.
Jon Lowry looked like a mall-arcade video-game nerd. He dressed like one, too. Complete control of eight hundred fifty million dollars had excited in him no lust for material possessions, and none of the kind of vanity that can be indulged by throwing wads of money in the direction of make-over spas, personal trainers and the custom department of Brooks Brothers Manhattan store. His nose was almost as big as his Adam’s apple, and his Adam’s apple was huge. His hair looked like he’d cut it himself. His clothes might have been the result of a solidarity-with-the-people phase, but I didn’t think so. What I thought was that, Jon being Jon, he probably hated shopping even more than he hated large groups of people. His sneakers were ancient Nikes, held together with electrical tape. His jeans were plain Levi’s and patched with calico squares. His denim jacket was clean but worn. He’d probably bought the whole outfit just after being let loose into the world, and not recovered from the experience yet. His Dr. Who T-shirt was brand-new, but he could have bought that off a souvenir stand in Manhattan without ever having to try it on.
My cigarette was out. I lit another one, ran my free hand through my hair and waited. It was impossible to start a conversation with Jonathon Hancock Lowry. The harder you tried, the faster he backpedaled.
He unclasped his hands. He stared at his shoes. He looked at the ceiling. Finally, he started clearing his throat: a good sign.
“So,” he said. “So. I guess—Phoebe isn’t here?”
“Phoebe isn’t here,” I agreed. “But don’t ask me where she is. I’ve been asleep.”
“I want to apologize for waking you up,” he said. “I really do. I had no idea—”
“The phone started ringing when you did,” I pointed out.
He brightened. “That’s right. It did. I don’t have to—Evelyn keeps trying to teach me all about moral relativity, and I think I understand it, but I just get so confused—”
“Evelyn is trying to teach you about moral relativity?”
“Evelyn is a very unusual person,” he said. “Really. She’s so dedicated. And so strong. She went out with me the very first time I asked her. And she didn’t even know who I was.”
“Mmm,” I said.
“Even after she knew who I was, she didn’t want me to buy her things. I keep giving her presents and she won’t take them. She wants to put everything into charities. My mother was like that.”
“I thought your mother died when you were two.”
“She did. They both did. My father, too. But Aunt Gertrude used to tell me about them. When she wasn’t telling me about—other things.”
“Like how the world was full of people trying to kidnap you?”
“She meant well,” Jon said. “She was just paranoid. I mean really paranoid. After I came into the money, the doctor sat down and had a talk with me, and what he said was if she hadn’t had control of my trust, she’d have been locked away years ago. There’s some medical name for it—”
“The popular name is paranoid schizophrenia. I think that will do.”
“Yeah. Well. I didn’t have her locked up. She may have been crazy, but she was happy crazy. And then a couple of years later she had a stroke anyway, so it didn’t matter. She died. And Evelyn’s right. No matter what it looked like at the time, it wasn’t my fault.”
“The stroke wasn’t your fault?” I asked in confusion.
“Yeah. I mean, when I did it, the lawyers said my father would have had a stroke about the money, and it took a ten-ton truck to kill him. And so I thought—”
“What did you do about the money?”
“Do?”
“Jon—”
“Yeah. You see, I didn’t exactly do something. I didn’t do something. When the money came to me, they liquidated all the investments—they had to, it was that way in the will—and then I was supposed to reinvest them. Only I didn’t.”
“You have eight hundred fifty million dollars that’s not invested in anything?”
“Well, some of it’s in gold. In fact, a lot of it is. And some of it’s in the house in Weston, you know, and my apartment in the city. But most of it’s in safety deposit boxes—you’re going to have a stroke, too.”
A stroke was hardly the word for it. I know very little about money. I have no talent for it, and even less interest. I had, however, got to that point in my life where people insisted on explaining it to me. I had absorbed a few of the more basic details. The cardinal rules were these: First, you used money to make money. Second, you never dipped into capital. I tried to think what Nick would do if I wanted to keep the money from even one of my royalty payouts—less than a hundred thousand dollars—in a safety deposit box. I came up with a mental image of thermonuclear war.
“It makes more sense than you think it does,” Jon said defensively. “If you’ve got eight hundred fifty million dollars, you should be able to do anything you want with your life.”
“What can you possibly do with money in safety-deposit boxes you couldn’t do with it earning interest?”
“Not file income tax.”
My mouth dropped open.
“People don’t realize,” Jon said. “You know, if you make any money at all in this country, you might as well tear up the Constitution and throw it away. The government gets to try you in tax court as guilty until proven innocent. You can have your property seized with no notice at all. They can search through your files without telling you they’re doing it. They can even search through your house. And you know what they say? They say following the Constitution would make it too hard for the government to collect its money. And the courts let them get away with it, too. The courts say the government’s right to take your money is more important than any right of any kind you think you have. And you know further w
hat? King George said that, too, except it was about the Magna Carta or whatever, and it was after he said that that John Adams decided to come over to the side of the American revolution. John Adams thought it was the most terrible thing he’d ever heard. He thought it was tyranny. And he was right.”
“But—” I said.
“I had a great-great-great-grandfather who fought in the revolution,” Jon said.
“But,” I said again.
“And the Bill of Rights makes it hard to convict murderers, too. I mean, if they were going to tear up the whole American idea and throw it in the wastebasket, wouldn’t you think they’d do it over the Son of Sam?”
My cigarette had gone out again, not burned down but just gone out. I relit it, put my lighter back on the night table, and started shaking my head.
“I think you’ve got to be missing something,” I said. “I think—”
“I’m not missing anything,” Jon said. “You think about it for a while. You get in trouble with the IRS just once, even with an honest mistake. Hell, you know what started me on this? I discovered a tax fraud and I went to report it. I just walked right into this IRS office in Greenwich and tried to do the right thing. I got treated like Al Capone. And it went on for three years. Now I don’t even have a social security number, or not one I have to use, anyway. As long as I don’t knock off some little old lady, I’m free. And it wasn’t true what they said about somebody stealing it.”
“Wasn’t true what who said?”
“The lawyers,” Jon said patiently. “They said keeping all that money in demand accounts—that’s when your money is somewhere and you can get it right out just by asking for it—anyway, they said if I kept it in demand accounts somebody could steal it, even if it made interest. That’s why I used the safety-deposit boxes, and the gold. Of course, when I die, whoever gets it will have to—”
“I’m surprised they didn’t have you locked up,” I said.
“If they couldn’t get Gertrude locked up, they certainly couldn’t get me locked up. Do you know when Phoebe’s coming back? I was supposed to help her out with something but then Evelyn wanted to show me around Baltimore and we got a little held up, so I was late, and then—”
“Evelyn wanted to show you around Baltimore?”
“She’s from Baltimore. I thought you knew that.”
“For some reason I thought she was from New York,” I said.
“And it’s three-thirty now,” Jon said. “Don’t you have to—do something to yourself before the party?”
Three-thirty. I levered myself off the bed. It takes me half an hour just to figure out what to do with my makeup.
At the far end of the little entrance foyer, there was a scratching and a churning and a clanking of gears. The door swung open. The sound of feet shuffling on a carpet melted into the sound of a slam.
A moment later, Phoebe appeared in the room, looked at both of us in turn and burst into tears.
Chapter Six
Most of the same people who think romance writers are stupid also think they’re overemotional, empty-headed ninnies who cry—or collapse into dead faints—at the smallest possible provocation. The truth was, I’d seen Phoebe cry only once or twice in all the years I’d known her, and her tears hadn’t been the histrionic kind. A slight watering. A suggestion of red at the rims of the eyelids. Even over the last few weeks, when pregnancy might have explained theatrics, it had never been more than that. You do not go from a half-slum in a dying industrial town in New Jersey to ten rooms on Central Park West by being empty-headed or hysterical. If Phoebe had burst into tears, I had to assume she had some reason to.
Unfortunately, I was still half asleep. My brain was working through all this very slowly. Phoebe’s brain was working through whatever it was working through at the speed of light. By the time I had decided that this was serious, not hormonal, she had sized up the situation in the room, turned her back on us and slammed another door. That door muffled the sound of her continued crying. Jonathon and I seemed to be sitting in a silent, echoing space. What echoed most loudly were the scrape and click of the bathroom door’s bolt being thrown.
My mental gears were even more sluggish than I’d thought they’d been. It wasn’t until then, when I knew she had locked herself away from me, that I realized why she’d looked so odd when she came in: she wasn’t in her Phoebe Damereaux costume. I thought back, trying to concentrate. Big brown tent dress. Shapeless brown coat. Espadrilles. Back in the days when she was a fat, poor girl in a thin, rich girls’ college, she’d dressed that way all the time—whether out of carelessness or hopelessness, I never knew. It had been years since I’d seen her in anything similar. For public occasions, she had the caftans. For lying around at home, she had three dozen monk’s-robe-style terry-cloth robes. For going out to dinner with friends she had tent dresses that had been made for her in the custom department of Saks, and looked it. And she never stepped outside in cold weather without one fur or another over her shoulders. I hadn’t even known she owned a cloth coat.
I tried to put it all together and couldn’t. She had been out, that had been obvious. Not only had she been wearing a coat, but I had the vague impression that her hair had been wet. She looked just as tired as she had when we’d first walked into the room, which meant she probably hadn’t been to sleep. I gave a quick look at the traveling clock: 3:42. It had been almost seven hours. Where in the name of God could Phoebe have gone, in a city she knew nothing about, for seven hours?
“Oh God,” Jon Lowry said.
I looked up to find him standing next to the vanity table, looking as stricken as a drunk driver who’d just run into a dog.
“I better go talk to her,” he said. “This is all my fault. I promised to—”
“Get out of here,” I said.
“What?”
“Get out of here. Now. Go. She’ll talk to you later.”
“But you don’t understand,” he said. “I was supposed to—”
“Whatever you were supposed to do, you didn’t do,” I said. “And it doesn’t matter now. Believe me. I have a fair idea of what this is about. It couldn’t possibly have anything to do with you.”
“Miss McKenna,” Jon said, “you just don’t—”
“Out,” I said again.
I got up, crossed the room to him and got him by the collar of his jacket. I’d read new-wave female-private-eye novels where the heroine is always beating up on the bad guys. I’d found them completely untenable. I’m a physically larger woman than most. I didn’t think I could beat up on anybody, not bare-handed. I beat up on Jonathon Hancock Lowry nonetheless. I got him away from the vanity table. I got him through the entrance foyer. I got him into the hall. Whether that was my strength, my emotions, or Jon’s innate politeness, I’ll never know. I doubt if it matters anyway.
He stood in the hall with his hands in the pockets of his jeans. “Patience,” he said, “if you’d just let me explain.”
“Later.”
“But I think I may—”
“Later,” I insisted. The truth was, if Phoebe had told Jon something she hadn’t told me, especially about this, I didn’t want to know about it. I was going to have a hard enough time doing what I had to do as it was.
“See you at the party,” I said. “We’ll be late.”
Then I closed the door in his face.
I stood in the foyer for a while, looking into the half-lit gloom. The curtains seemed to be closed on perfect exterior blackness. If there were streetlamps out there, or floodlights for the portico at the hotel’s front door, their light didn’t reach us. The only light that did came from the night-table lamp I’d turned on when I first woke. All that came from the bathroom were intermittent eruptions of tears and heaving.
I put my forehead against the bathroom door and said, “Phoebe?”
“Go away.”
“No.”
“Go away. I’m fine. I’m getting dressed.”
“Your clothes ar
e all out here.”
“I’ve got the green caftan in here. I’m getting dressed.”
“You wore the green caftan on the train. You had the red cleaned for the party tonight. It’s out here. Come and get it.”
“If you don’t go away, I’m never going to speak to you again.”
“If you’re not out of there in thirty seconds, I’m going to get Amelia to break down this door.”
“Shit,” Phoebe said.
“I don’t see why I should care if you stop speaking to me anyway,” I said. “You haven’t been for the past three weeks.”
Footsteps on tile, the metal whine of a bolt retracting: the door swung slowly open, and Phoebe stuck her head out. She looked awful. Her hair wasn’t wet. It was that gritty-dull matte hair gets when it has dried after being drenched with sweat. She was wearing no makeup. She usually wore a lot. She almost never needed it. At that moment, she needed it the way Al Capone had needed a good tax lawyer.
Al Capone. Tax lawyers. I still had Jonathon Hancock Lowry wandering around in my head someplace.
I stepped back and let Phoebe come past me. She edged along the wall until she got to the room. Then she walked carefully to the bed she’d claimed as her own—the one with the piles of clothes on it—and sat down.
“I’m pregnant,” she said.
“I know,” I said.
“I thought you might,” she said. “I suppose it’s been obvious.”
“Obvious? Why? Just because you’ve been throwing up every ten seconds since we left New York and you look like you’ve gained fifty pounds?”
