by Jane Haddam
Maybe it would operate as an antidote to all these ridiculous people she really didn’t want to see.
7
KELLY PRATT HAD BEEN staring all day at a piece of paper that said “Brayne Estate—Disposition,” and all it had gotten him was a backache and a throb in his head the size of the Heart That Ate Cleveland. It didn’t help that the first item under the title had been a disclaimer: “Effects of Lillian Kent, Hereinafter known as Lilith Brayne.” It helped even less that the calculations had been done well before the general use of computers, and that a couple of the figures had been corrected, by hand, in the margins. Kelly was supposed to make something sensible of this piece of paper, to present to the lawyer and to Tasheba Kent and Cavender Marsh, and he just hadn’t been able to do it. Now he was practically on his way up to Maine, with his suitcase packed, and his best yachting clothes laid out for him on the navy blue satin wing chair back in his bedroom, and all he could think about was what an idiot he was going to look like when the three of them got around to asking him questions.
Kelly Pratt was a tall, broad man in his early fifties, going to paunch but hiding it well, who wished he had changed his last name at the same time he had changed his first. He had changed his first-—which had been Hubert, for God’s sake, Hubert Pratt—right after he had gotten out of the army and right before he had gone into college. Being called “Hubie” for two straight years in Korea would have been enough for anybody. He had chosen “Kelly” because, in spite of the fact that he was working his way to business school and a sensible career in accounting, he had secret fantasies of becoming an actor. There was an actor everybody said he looked like, named John Forsyth, who had a television program in afternoon reruns that year called Bachelor Father. The father in question on that program had a niece who lived with him named Kelly. That was where Kelly got his name. It would have bothered him endlessly if anybody had realized that he had taken his name from a girl, but nobody did, so that worked out all right.
Now, thirty years later, Kelly Pratt looked even more like John Forsyth than he had then, and John Forsyth had been in a new television program, and Kelly liked to imagine himself as Blake Carrington. That was the good thing about this trip to Maine. Spending the weekend with a couple of old movie stars was exactly the kind of thing Blake Carrington would do, although he probably wouldn’t bring their accounting work along to go over the figures. Normally, Kelly would never have gone on an errand like this himself. The tiny accounting company he had started with his best friend from college, Abraham Kahn, had grown. It wasn’t the size of the giants like Arthur Andersen or Deloitte, but it took up three floors of a good building in midtown Manhattan and kept a hundred and fifty people on payroll. When they started out, Kelly had wanted to do as much corporate work as they could get, but Bram had been adamant. “Do personals,” he’d said, “big accounts, but personals.” And Bram had been right. Kahn and Pratt handled the business affairs of three stars of the Metropolitan Opera, two internationally famous symphony conductors, all six of the principal characters on the most important soap opera still shot in New York, and the entire roster of the most successful team in the history of the National Football League. Kahn and Pratt even appeared on and off in Liz Smith’s column. It had become a status symbol of a sort for Kahn and Pratt to agree to handle you. Lately, there had even been a trickle of rock-and-roll stars through the door, including a woman who spent more of her time on stage half-naked than reasonably clothed. Kelly had been all excited about it, but Bram had refused to let him take her on. Rock stars made Bram very, very nervous.
Now Bram was sitting in the visitor’s chair in Kelly Pratt’s office, smoking a pipe, his long legs stretched out across the carpet. Kelly sometimes thought it was Bram who should have changed his name. Tall and lean, with the chiseled features of a Yankee aristocrat, Abraham Kahn could have passed himself off as a John Endicott or a Martin Cadwalader any time he wanted to. Instead, he belonged to the Harmonie Club and a Conservative synagogue and kept an Israeli flag hanging on a pole next to an American one in a corner of his office.
Bram had his legs crossed with one ankle on the other knee. His pipe was sending smoke signals up to the ceiling. Every time he looked at the paper Kelly had given him, he sighed heavily.
“It doesn’t make any sense,” Bram said finally.
Kelly exploded. “I know it doesn’t make any sense, Bram. I know that. I was hoping for something a little more constructive.”
“How much more constructive could I be? Just look at this sheet, Kelly. Whole chunks of money just seem to go missing. Except for the daughter’s trust, of course. That’s intact.”
“That would have to be intact,” Kelly said. “It was administered by the Chase Manhattan Bank. They’re too damn high-profile a company to pull any crap.”
“Yes, well, the problem is, you couldn’t really say that anybody pulled any crap in this case. You couldn’t say much of anything. It never occurred to me before, but living without computers must have been heaven for con men and cheats.”
“Most people would say that living with computers has been heaven for con men and cheats.”
Bram waved this away. “That’s because too many of the people who are trying to catch the con men and the cheats don’t know how to run the computers. Remember what I’ve always told you. We get hit by a hacker, we don’t prosecute him, we hire him.”
“Yes, Bram, I know. You’ve told me this before.”
“If this had been done on a computer, we might be able to trace it.” Bram sighed. “But the way it is—do you think they were paying bribes?”
“What? Who?”
“Cavender Marsh and possibly Tasheba Kent. Wasn’t there a rumor at the time it all happened that Cavender Marsh had killed his wife?”
“The death was ruled accidental,” Kelly said.
“I know what it was ruled,” Bram said impatiently. “But look at this. Lilith Brayne died on a Wednesday, and when she did she had almost a million francs in her account in Paris. That’s what? About two hundred thousand dollars?”
“Something like that.”
“On Friday she had only eight hundred seventy-five thousand francs. That’s exactly twenty-five thousand dollars gone.”
“I know that. That’s the kind of thing that’s bothering me.”
“On the following Tuesday,” Bram went on, “the account went down to seven hundred and fifty thousand francs. Another twenty-five thousand dollars gone.”
“Yes,” Kelly said in a singsong voice, “and on the following Thursday there was another twenty-five thousand gone, and on the Monday after that there was another twenty-five thousand dollars gone. Five hundred thousand francs, one hundred thousand dollars, disappeared in the course of two weeks. Just gone.”
“I wonder how they got it.”
“That doesn’t worry me,” Kelly said. “Cavender Marsh was her husband, after all. He would have had access.”
“Maybe. But wasn’t there a lot of publicity about this thing?”
“Hell, yes. It wiped the Nazis off the front pages for six days.”
“Well, then. He couldn’t have just taken it, could he? He couldn’t have just walked into the bank and withdrawn money from a dead woman’s account without someone remarking on it. Especially this much money.”
“They use the Napoleonic Code in France, or they did then. In the Napoleonic Code, everything a wife has belongs to her husband.”
“I don’t care what some code says. It would still have been an enormous scandal. There aren’t any checks?”
“No checks,” Kelly said. “No paper at all.”
“And since this is the world before computers we’re talking about, no withdrawals from the side of the bank, either.” Bram shook his head. “Not that any bank would let you withdraw that much on a cash card. Ah, what a mess. Is this going to be significantly important to the work of the weekend?”
“It depends,” Kelly said. “There’s a daughter. Cavend
er Marsh’s daughter. It depends on what kind of a mood she’s in.”
“Cavender Marsh and Tasheba Kent had a daughter?”
“No, Cavender Marsh and Lilith Brayne had a daughter, about three months before Lilith Brayne died. She got sent to California to live with an aunt after all the fuss was over.”
“You mean they dumped the kid on an aunt and went off together? Cavender Marsh and Tasheba Kent?”
“Yup,” Kelly said.
“Good God.”
“So you can just see what kind of a mood she’s likely to be in. I’ve talked to that lawyer, Lydia Acken, and she says she’s tried to explain what it’s going to be like, to Marsh and Kent, but she just can’t get through. They think it all happened much too far back. They think everybody is as mellowed with age as they are.”
“Oh, this is going to be fun.”
“I’d feel a lot better if I could clear up these discrepancies,” Kelly said, “but I can’t, and I don’t think anybody anywhere could, and you know what that means.”
“Lawsuits,” Bram said solemnly.
“Lawsuits,” Kelly agreed.
“If I were you, I think I’d develop a tendency to migraine headaches, so you can repair to your room with a killing headache whenever the going gets rough.”
“If I did that, I’d probably spend the whole weekend in my room.”
Bram was handing back the paper. Kelly took it and put it on the blotter on his desk. He didn’t have to pack it into his briefcase because he had copies. This was a copy, too. The original was in a bank vault somewhere down on Wall Street, in the safekeeping of the Lilith Brayne Trust.
“What do you think it is about really rich people,” Kelly asked, “that makes them so damn suicidal?”
8
WHEN GERALDINE DART TOOK this job she had with Tasheba Kent and Cavender Marsh, she thought of it as a definitive break in the history of her life. Up until the moment when Geraldine had first taken the little motorboat from the landing at Hunter’s Pier, across the choppy-glass surface of the Atlantic to the island, she had been just another girl who had graduated from high school but not gone on to college. She could type ninety words a minute and take excellent shorthand, but she didn’t have the money to go to one of the big secretarial schools—and even if she had had it, she didn’t think it would have helped her much. Geraldine Dart had been the object of jokes since she was a tiny child. Tall, thin, awkward, worse than plain, and born to a pair of clam diggers on top of it—everybody had always assumed that she was stupid as well as both ugly and poor, but it wasn’t true. Geraldine actually had a very fine mind, and—what was more important, and more rare—a very clear-sighted, unsentimental way of looking at things. She knew that the women who ended up being private secretaries or personal assistants to the heads of giant corporations, the women who made the truly spectacular salaries in secretarial work, had all at least started out pretty. They were hired for being pretty. Women like Geraldine got jobs in typing pools and word-processing departments and back offices, where they could safely be ignored. Geraldine had decided that it was smarter to save her money and look around for interesting work. Once she had a job she liked, she could settle down a little and decide what she wanted to do next.
Actually, what Geraldine wanted to do next was to buy a house, a three-family place right in the middle of Hunter’s Pier, and rent it out. She had been saving her money for four years now, working on the island and getting to live in, and she almost had enough. She went across to the mainland every Thursday afternoon to deposit her salary check in her savings account. Tasheba Kent and Cavender Marsh made fun of her, she knew that. They thought she was a stuck-up little Baptist prude, because she went to church every Sunday and wore her skirts full and long and her blouses high on the neck. Geraldine didn’t care. She bought the cheapest clothes she could find. They were large and long not because she was afraid of sex, but because she knew how angular and ugly her body was. She went to church on Sunday not because she was pious and committed to God and religion, but because she needed as much legitimate time away from the island as she could get. The island was a suffocating place, and its inhabitants were odder than Geraldine could have been if she’d taken an overdose of strangeness pills for a year.
Today was only Wednesday, but Geraldine was going over to the mainland anyway. The excuse she had given Cavender Marsh was that there were some last-minute things she needed to pick up, what with all the guests coming for the weekend. This was not true. Geraldine never left anything to the last minute. She was the most ferociously organized person on earth. Because Cavender Marsh left everything until it was too late and couldn’t organize his way from the living room to the bathroom, the old man had taken her at her word and told her to have a pleasant day. He hadn’t even protested when she’d said she was going to drive the boat over herself, instead of waiting for Tommy the handyman to do it for her.
Geraldine preferred taking the boat over herself because it gave her a chance to think, and because she didn’t much like Tommy the handyman. Tommy’s people had lived just down the beach from Geraldine’s when Geraldine was growing up. It was Tommy’s opinion that Geraldine had gotten Above Herself. Geraldine liked the ocean even when it was choppy, and the wind even when it was cold. She liked the little boat because she could handle it easily and because it didn’t go too fast. In spite of the fact that Geraldine had lived on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean all her life, she couldn’t swim.
She pulled the boat into the tiny dock set off for it at Hunter’s Pier and threw the rope around the wet and rotting dock post. Then she anchored her purse firmly onto her right shoulder and climbed up onto the pier. The pier was wet and slippery. The air was wet and much colder than it should have been for this time of year. As always when she brought the boat in by herself, she wished she had the courage to buy herself a pair of jeans. Then she reminded herself of how ridiculous she would look in them, and put the whole thing out of her mind.
Geraldine had reached the end of the pier and the start of the boardwalk when she heard her name called—or a version of her name, which on the pier came to the same thing. She stopped and looked right and left for Jason Rand.
“Gerry,” he was calling. “Gerry. Wait up a minute.”
Jason Rand was the only person who had ever called Geraldine anything but “Geraldine” in her life, or “Miss Dart,” which was worse. He was a tall, bulky man in his late thirties or early forties, with thick black hair that was going to gray and skin that had seen too much wind. He was also the man who owned this pier and rented out the spaces on it. If Hunter’s Pier had been a fancier kind of place, Jason might have called what he owned a marina.
Jason was climbing out of the small shack he used as an office, tripping over nets waiting on the boardwalk to be repaired and anchors left to turn to rust by boatmen who didn’t take care of them. Jason was always complaining about how many of the men who rented his pier spaces didn’t care about the boats they used to make their livings. He said too damn many of them only cared about the booze they drank and the pot they smoked. Geraldine had lived around clammers and boatmen long enough to know that he was right.
Geraldine waited where she was and let him catch up to her. He was wearing a thick down vest over a worn plaid flannel shirt with rolled-up sleeves. His jeans had chalk marks all around the knees.
“I’m glad I caught you,” he said. “I wasn’t expecting you. It’s only Wednesday.”
“Big weekend up at the house,” Geraldine told him. She didn’t elaborate, because he had heard it all already. “You look like you’ve been knee-deep in muck all morning.”
“I’ve been doing some caulking in the bathroom in the office. You in a hurry? You want to come over and have some coffee?”
Geraldine agreed.
They went down the boardwalk together, Geraldine stepping carefully in her wedge-heeled rubber-soled shoes, Jason swinging along heedlessly, used to the terrain. When they got to the shack, h
e opened the door for her. Geraldine stepped down into the large main room and took a seat on one of the benches. The room was dirty, as rooms of this kind usually were, but not as dirty as it could have been. Jason was a neat man, and his coffee pot was shined and spotless and his white porcelain coffee mugs were spotless, too. Geraldine didn’t know any other man who was orderly like that. She found it attractive.
Jason poured her a mug of coffee and handed it over. Then he handed over the milk and the sugar and a spoon.
“Don’t tell me,” he said. “Neither of the two old folks can get their act together, and they’ve got you running around at the last minute like a chicken with its head cut off.”
“Not exactly,” Geraldine said slowly. She stirred milk and sugar into her coffee and frowned. “You want to know the truth, I’ve been lying to people all day. I’ve been saying I had to come into town and do some errands, but I didn’t really. That’s not it.”
“What is it?”
Geraldine had put her purse down beside her on the bench. She picked it up and rummaged around in it until she found a piece of photocopy paper, folded in quarters. She handed it over to Jason Rand.
“Look at that,” she said. “That’s the guest list for this weekend. Look at the names.”
“Is there supposed to be someone on here I recognize?”
“Look at the name on the bottom.”
“Bennis Hannaford,” Jason read. “Isn’t that that guy that writes the books about the knights and the unicorns that they’ve always got all over the front of the B. Dalton’s down in Portland?”
“It’s a woman, actually,” Geraldine told him. “But that’s the same one. Look at the name next to hers. In the parentheses.”
