How I Spent My Summer Vacation

by Gillian Roberts

  “Do you have any idea with whom?” Why did I ask?

  He shook his head.

  “Do you remember anybody else? How about a woman in a sari?”

  “Probably. There often is, even though they’re not drinkers, you know.”

  “Somebody pregnant with a ponytail?”

  Frankie shrugged. “Why would I remember? And what are you trying to say? That somebody who heard my joke about the room framed Sasha?” He sounded nervous, overly incredulous, like a bad actor. “That doesn’t make any sense.” He wasn’t doing a convincing job of making the idea preposterous.

  Neither of us mentioned that there was one person who didn’t have to overhear a thing in order to know about the room because he’d arranged for the switch.

  “Who’d have done such a thing?” Frankie asked.

  “Somebody who wanted to get away with murder, that’s who.” I left him a generous tip, to stay on his good side.

  Eight

  I CHECKED THE DESK. Half an hour ago Mackenzie had called in a message that he’d be back “soon.” Exactly how long from now constituted soon? An advanced degree in semantics would come in handy around that man.

  Explication would also be helpful with Frankie the bartender. I mentally poked through everything he’d said, and came up with precious little. The papers had already made clear Reese’s solid financial status and prestige, but they hadn’t mentioned the angry wife. Or the pending TV show—could it be relevant? Or the business he had in Atlantic City. What had it been?

  The paper had said that Jesse Reese’s office was in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, about an hour away, just across the bridge from Philly. What better place than a man’s home away from home to dig for information about appointments, angry wives, and pending TV shows? I knew I was throwing out a net over nothingness, but maybe something would come up. Something that would get Sasha out of prison before sundown.

  * * *

  I wished I were wearing more businesslike garb than Mackenzie’s oversized maroon sweater over linen slacks which were even more intensely wrinkled after the hour-long drive to Cherry Hill. And my convertible-whipped hair was the most rumpled of all. I smoothed myself down, futilely, and hoped my creased aura made me look authentically a member of the working press. Whether I could behave like one was another question. I had only old movies and the six o’clock news upon which to base my performance, but I felt in need of an alias here. I didn’t want anybody associated with Jesse Reese to know that I was associated with his accused murderer.

  I was surprised by the modesty of the investment counselor’s offices. I always thought the handling of money required vaulting spaces and the hush of expensive carpeting, but Jesse Reese’s reception area looked a lot like a dentist’s waiting room. Three chairs covered in a blurred orange and brown stripe sat on colorless flat carpeting across from a desk occupied by a middle-aged woman in taupe hair and suit. A small name plaque said NORMA EVANS.

  “Yes?” She stood up. She was about my size, but managed to make me feel unequal, intimidated. “Can I help you?”

  “Hildy Johnson here,” I said, hand outstretched. Would she recognize the reporter in His Girl Friday? It was the only journalistic name my mind summoned. “Hilda,” I added. “Glad to meet you, Ms. Evans.”

  She looked at my hand as if it were a puzzling offering. “What is it you want, Ms. Johnson?” She sat back down, but did not invite me to do the same.

  “Well, a good interview, of course. Or did you mean that metaphysically?”

  She blinked, her mouth set in a tight, straight line. “I’m afraid I don’t do interviews.”

  “I meant Mr. Reese. I’m his three-thirty appointment.” I looked down at her desk, pointing my index finger, pretending to be aiming for a date book, pretending to believe that Hildy Johnson would be written on it.

  Miss Evans, who, after all, had just lost an employer and probably a job, looked at my pointed finger as if it were a gun, and seemed ready to call the cops. “If this is a joke,” she said, her bottom lip just this side of a tremble, “it’s in poor taste.”

  It was in poor taste, and I knew it, but Sasha’s being in jail was in worse taste. “A joke?” I said. “I sent him tear sheets and my résumé, and drove all the way from McKeesport. I specialize in geriatric issues, for Modern Maturity and Senior and oh, geez, you wouldn’t believe how many publications there are for our older citizens. I’m calling my story ‘More Gold for Your Golden Years,’ and I have an editor really excited about it.”

  She looked so unhappy and uncomfortable, I felt like the predatory press, the people who jam microphones into the faces of the newly bereaved and demand to know whether they are really, really upset or not.

  Norma Evans seemed unable to compose herself. She aligned the edges of papers, tapping them this way and that, her full attention on the job. As soon as they were uncovered, I tried to read the top one, a list of names or words and numbers, but it was upside down and she kept the papers in motion. Finally, she lifted the stack and slid it somewhere out of sight, and only then did she look up at me. She cleared her throat. “I’m sorry, Miss—Jackson, was it? I’m not quite myself today.”

  “Um…” Was it Jackson? What was it? “Johnson!” I finally said, rather too urgently.

  “Johnson, yes. I’ve been with Mr. Reese for seventeen years.” She paused, closed her eyes, and took a deep breath. “He always praised my command of details. I never forgot things. I took care of every aspect of his personal and professional life and work, and certainly of his calendar, and I don’t remember any… But in any case, there’s been a tragedy, you see. Mr. Reese…” This time she groped for a handkerchief, but her suit skirt had no pockets. I pushed the box of tissues that was on the side of her desk in front of her, and she nodded, took one, and dabbed at the corners of her eyes. “Mr. Reese died last night,” she whispered.

  “Died?” I sat down in the chair next to her desk. “Ohmigod! That’s horrible. I didn’t even know he was sick. It must have been so sudden.”

  “It was.”

  “Heart attacks are scary,” I whispered. “I did an article on ten warning signs that your heart might—”

  She sniffed loudly and put the tissue to her nose, shaking her head all the while. “It’s worse than that. He was murdered. Killed by a young woman, a, um, brand-new acquaintance. Such a good man.” She glanced at me. “But human. That little…weakness for women. Still, it’s terrible. Terrible. I’m sorry about your story,” Norma Evans said, “but of course, as you can see…”

  “I’m sorry for you. You seem to have been quite fond of Mr. Reese.”

  “Seventeen years,” she murmured. “Longer than either of his marriages, he always said. You know they call a man’s secretary his office wife, don’t you? Not, of course, to imply that we had anything except a professional relationship, but when you take care of every detail of a man’s life for all those years…”

  “Then who—what should I—what’s to become of all this—are you running the office now?”

  “The office is closing. Is already closed.”

  “You mean for the day?”

  “I mean forever. Without Mr. Reese…” She shook her head. “If he still had a partner, maybe, but on his own, who’s to replace him? But I’m sure you can find another counselor to interview.”

  “But Mr. Reese’s focus on senior citizens was the whole point, and how many financial advisors specialize in that? Especially to the kind of small investors he cared about. Could you recommend somebody else?” It was hard to whine, seem sympathetic, and simultaneously snoop. “That former partner you just mentioned, maybe?”

  “Ray Palford?” She looked doubtful, troubled. “I wouldn’t bother. I don’t even know if he still handles the elderly. As you said, not many people are interested in the ordinary retiree, the modest portfolio. Mr. Reese was a rarity. Besides, Ray Palford moved his office all the way down to Margate. I don’t think it would be worth your while.” She waved off
the suggestion, but I definitely did not. Margate was a hop, a jitney ride, or a brisk boardwalk trot away from my hotel. What a happy geographic relocation.

  Margate was also a close enough home base from which to zip down and murder someone in Atlantic City. “Was the partnership dissolved recently?” I asked. “Because maybe Mr. Palford would remember—”

  “Three years ago.”

  Not exactly the kind of new and painful rupture that could lead to murder. I was disappointed. The image of a tall ex-partner in a wig had a lot of appeal.

  “I’m sorry I can’t be more helpful.”

  “Looks like I’m back at Go,” I said. “Could I bother you for my tear sheets?”

  She was going to have neck problems if she didn’t stop punctuating her sentences with head shakes. “I’m sorry, but I don’t understand what sheets you’re talking about. I’m sure I would have noticed if something of yours came in, and we wouldn’t have torn it, anyway. Now if you’ll excuse me, as you can see, I’m packing things up and there’s so much to do….”

  I wanted to see the inner office, to get to know Jesse Reese by his artifacts, if through no other way. “Tear sheets are pages from magazines with my stories on them,” I said. “I know it’s crass to ask for them when you have so many more important things on your mind, but I don’t really have all that many—I sent him originals, not copies, and if I have to start all over again…”

  “There are no magazine pages in the office. I would have noticed.”

  “There must be! He thanked me for them. Complimented me on them—and said he’d return them.”

  She had a sturdy middle-aged body, but the suit enclosing it behaved as if there was nothing inside it at all. There wasn’t a wrinkle anywhere, not even at the lap or inner arms. Some other time I’d love to ask her the secret of her imperviousness. “Please,” I said, really into my role as professional pest, “maybe you’re not recognizing them. Senior’s on newsprint. It doesn’t look like a magazine.” My parents always picked it up at the deli. It was a free paper.

  Miss Evans raked her fingers through her gray-brown hair. “If I let you peek in his office, do you promise not to touch anything? We have to get things ready for the estate and the clients.”

  “We? Are there other employees here?”

  “A figure of speech. I’m so used to referring to us as…” This produced another round of head-shaking and nose-blowing.

  “Normally, I wouldn’t intrude,” I said, “but free-lancing’s so hard, and a good set of tear sheets is pretty valuable.”

  The phone rang just as she touched the doorknob to his office. “The machine will pick up,” she said. “The message says everything anybody needs to know. I wouldn’t get a single thing done if I answered every call. Besides, I can hear the caller, in case of an emergency.”

  I was glad I hadn’t phoned ahead. I would have been told that the office was closed, which was the message I now heard beginning, in Norma Evans’s patient but tired-sounding voice. She didn’t say what had happened, but you could tell by her melancholy timbre that something dire had occurred.

  Jesse Reese’s office was a larger, slightly more opulent space. Still, there was something slick and surface about it, a sense that the woods were veneers, the velvet sofa a rental item, the liquors in the cabinet inferior brands poured into expensive bottles.

  It was obvious that most of Reese’s business must have been carried on elsewhere, at those junior colleges and retirement homes Frankie had mentioned, with elderly people reluctant to travel.

  There were few personal touches, although some things had either already been put in cartons or were never unpacked. Two boxes, flaps open, sat near the bookcase. The books on the shelves looked fake, or chosen for their binding colors, the furnishings safe and predictable. The only individualized items hung on the wall behind his desk; a plaque from the Chamber of Commerce, a framed photograph of Mr. Reese and a hearty-looking man, and a soft-edged portrait of a woman, painted, apparently, by a brush full of marzipan. “His wife?” I murmured.

  “Yes.”

  The portrait must have been commissioned in Mrs. Reese’s pregrommet phase. She was wearing something translucent and dreamy.

  Half Norma Evans’s attention was still in the outer office, listening to a droning male voice on the answering machine. I could make out his inflection—questioning—but not the words.

  “Poor Mrs. Reese. She must be devastated,” I murmured. Jesse Reese’s desk was bare except for a clock and a narrow dish in which lay a pen, so I looked back at the wall, at the photograph of Reese in this very room, at this very desk below a wall that then held only the saccharine portrait of his wife. He was half out of his chair, en route to a handshake, one hand extended, the other flat on the desk, giving him balance. His little finger touched a photograph of a woman in a swimsuit and high heels. Miss Wannabe America. A smiling man who looked like a gone-to-seed athlete offered up the Cherry Hill Citizen of the Year plaque that now hung on the wall next to this picture.

  Those tear sheets in which I had come almost to believe were, not surprisingly, nowhere to be found. “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” I said in my Hildy whine.

  She shook her head. “Sorry. I can’t imagine what became of them.”

  “Did his wife take her photograph?” I asked. “The one on the desk in this photo?”

  Miss Evans looked startled, checking me, then the desk, then the photo on the wall, then me again. “No,” she said. Miss Evans wasn’t in a mood to chatter.

  The phone rang again, and again was followed by the patient, tired sounds of Norma Evans explaining the changed status of the office. It was a very changed status and a very long message.

  “Maybe my tear sheets are inside one of the cabinets,” I suggested.

  “I’m sorry, but those cabinets are false fronts,” she said in her near whisper. “They contain stereo equipment and a TV. There are no tear sheets here, Miss Johnson.”

  In the outer office a querulous voice spoke—shouted, actually. “Norma,” it said, “don’t give me that crap about being closed. I know you’re there, so…”

  The voice sounded mixed in a cement truck.

  Norma Evans bolted and raced from the office, diving for her desk. She got to the receiver with amazing, middle-age-defying speed. For a second longer I heard the voice utter expletives, but then Miss Evans pressed a button and the sound stopped. “I’m here,” she said. “Somebody was—is—in the office and I’m busy.”

  I couldn’t hear anything more, except for excited squawks from the caller. I crossed the room and looked into those two cartons.

  Videotapes. Prerecorded. “An Afternoon with Jesse Reese,” it was. “Seminars on Savings.” My pocketbook was too small, but I shoved a tape under the baggy excess of Mackenzie’s sweater, my heart racing. Then, taking a deep breath, I went out to the reception area where Norma Evans was still on the phone. As I walked in, I faced the back of the woman’s desk, and I saw that the papers she’d been straightening so obsessively had been shoved, corners helter-skelter, into a large violet and navy bag, not into a desk drawer. Norma Evans, receiver still to her ear, followed the arc of my eyes and looked ashamed. I’d caught her being less than efficient. Downright slovenly, in fact.

  When she hung up, I thought it was time for Hildy Johnson to be concerned about something besides her own prematurely terminated story. “The people who had accounts with Mr. Reese, what happens to them?” I asked.

  “But surely,” she said, “since you won’t be interviewing—”

  “I was thinking that if we’re protecting financial futures, we have to know what happens when your financial counselor dies.” Well, actually, it wasn’t John Q. Public as much as I who needed to know if there was any percentage in killing off your financial advisor. “Is it possible to get a list of his customers? Or do you call them clients?”

  “I’m sorry,” she said once again. “That’s privileged information, not something I cou
ld share with you. But I can assure you that Mr. Reese’s clients are being duly notified.” She took a moment to compose herself. “It will be up to each of them to determine how and with whom to manage their funds from now on.”

  “Given”—I gestured at the unoccupied office—”what’s happened, I’m thinking of a whole different spin for the article. ‘The Death of Professor Money.’ That’s what they called him, wasn’t it?”

  “That sounds ghoulish,” she whispered, her hands to her chest.

  I agreed, but there were still things I wanted to know. How did real journalists ferret out information, aside from those who arrived with big bucks as bribes? “It wouldn’t be,” I assured her. “I promise you that. It would be…moving. A tribute to him. You said…it…happened in Atlantic City. Was he there to see a client? Maybe that’s my angle.”

  She looked startled again. She had a very small repertoire of visible emotions—timidity, unsettledness, shock, sorriness.

  “Oh, maybe you’re worried about that…that woman. I wouldn’t mention any of that in print. I promise. That’s just between the two of us.”

  “And the entire world. There will be a trial, of course, and it’s already in all the papers.”

  “I meant, was he on business before then? Could I interview his last client? Follow her through what she does now, something like that?”

  She shook her head. “The fact is, I don’t know who his appointment was with last night.” She looked as if that failure burned inside her with an angry flame. “It wasn’t on his calendar. Just the way you weren’t.”

  “So, then, you can’t help me?” I forgot myself—Hildy Johnson forgot herself—and gesticulated, thereby almost dislodging the pilfered tape. I gasped and clutched my side, holding the tape in place.

  Miss Evans blanched. Her eyes widened. A tiny spot of rust appeared on each cheek. She shook her head. “Are you all right?” she asked.

  I nodded. “Just…disappointed,” I stammered.