How I Spent My Summer Vacation (22 page)

Inside, the office was much closer to my fantasies of how a citadel of money should look than Jesse Reese’s had been. Every furnishing had started out in the best circles and had since mellowed into understatement. Attractively aged Persian carpets, an inlaid wood coffee table, and buttery leather couches softened the reception area.

I wouldn’t know from personal experience, but I assume that the harsh realities of profit and loss sound a lot better in this muted environment.

His receptionist was considerably younger than Miss Evans. A new generation, which was, perhaps, why I never once heard her echo the older woman’s “I’m sorry.” This time, when asked my business, I said something that was almost the truth. “I’m collecting information about the late Mr. Reese. Mr. Palford’s former partner. My name is… Harriet. Harriet Vane.” Well, part of it was the truth. Almost.

She nodded, rather curtly. Good thing so few people read these days, although I had heard that mysteries were enjoying a renaissance. Not Dorothy Sayers, perhaps? In any case, the general illiteracy makes it easier for the basically unimaginative to come up with an alias.

The receptionist checked her watch and double-checked his appointment book, then pressed a button on her phone and explained. I heard squawks and clipped questions. “Yes, Mr. Palford, I remember.” She replaced the receiver and flashed me a wide, insincere smile. “He can see you for a few minutes. Then he has to leave for his scheduled meeting.”

I thanked her and was ushered into larger, still more upholstered and waxed quarters. Surely investment counseling involved computer programs, numbers and guesstimates and projections on a little screen, but there was no hint of electronics. The office would have felt homey and familiar to Mary, Queen of Scots.

Computations were being made offstage, possibly in a galley belowstairs, filled with chained and half-naked economist slaves punching keypads.

Ray Palford stood behind a massive expanse of polished mahogany and slipped papers into a briefcase that looked made of glove leather. He himself appeared stitched of the same material. Tall, fit, smooth-skinned, younger than his dead ex-partner. “What is it this time?” he asked by way of greeting.

“Excuse me?”

“Brooke said you were investigating Jesse Reese, not me, so if you’re here, there must be yet another snafu. I was afraid of this.” He stopped filling his briefcase and gave me a stern look. “And I assume you have notified my lawyer that you were questioning me directly. Well,” he said, “out with it. What now?”

“Listen, Mr. Palford, you’ve got me confused with somebody else. I don’t have an ‘it’ to bring out. I just want to know about your former partner.”

“What’s happened with the suit?”

“You’ve mixed me up with your tailor?”

He settled into an amused relief. “Have a seat, have a seat.” He waved me into a wing chair with a petit point design of the hunt. “Who are you, then? What’s this about?”

“Grandmother Vane—she’s housebound, but she’s adamant about this, hysterical almost, and it does horrible things to her blood pressure and her heart—but she wants to call the police because she thinks Jesse Reese took her money. I’m not sure she’s exactly…all there, you know? And now, of course, to make things worse, he’s dead, poor man. I mean I don’t think the police would be interested in a half-crazed old woman’s… Anyway, I told her I’d consult another expert, and since you were once his partner, I thought maybe you could help explain things to her. We’d pay, of course, but I’m really at a loss. If we could make an appointment for you to talk with her, would you? I just had to find out—I promised her I’d find out today. She’s panicking because of the news, you see.”

He shook his head. “I’m sorry for your grandmother,” he said. “If her suspicious are grounded in reality, of course. But as you may have inferred from my erroneous greeting to you, I am already embroiled in a lawsuit with the late Mr. Reese, and I feel that it would be improper for me to…well, I’m not exactly an impartial judge of Mr. Reese’s fiduciary ethics.”

“I don’t know what to do,” I said. “I tried talking to his assistant, but she—”

“Poor, pathetic Norma? You won’t get anything except adoration from her. She’d faint if you suggested foul play. When they finally release Jesse’s body, she’ll probably commit suttee—immolate herself on his funeral pyre. She was Jesse’s ideal woman, completely acquiescent. When I read the newspaper account of the manner of his death, about that big woman who killed him, I was surprised, in fact, that Jesse had taken up with a strong creature long enough for her to belt him. A fatal experiment, a very wrong change of pace for him. He likes people he can dominate, intimidate. Of course, even little flowers turn into man-eating plants. Look at his widow, an example in point. She was once Miss Sweetness and Light.”

“Off-the-record,” I said. “I really need some help. This is out of my league completely.”

“What’s off-the-record? What are we talking about?”

“Anything you say. Is it possible that Grandma’s not crazy? That the man did worse than make bad investment judgments?”

Ray Palford raised his eyebrows and almost nodded. He looked at his watch, a wafer of gold, and scowled. “Let us say that Jesse Reese’s and my philosophies of business—in fact our philosophies of life—were incompatible. I choose to believe that in both arenas, my preferences are the civilized ones. Mr. Reese, of course, would have and indeed did consider them timid or unimaginative. Had we both lived to be centenarians, we would have come no closer to agreement.”

I picked my way through his weedy sentences. Was he angry? Enough to have killed Reese? I pictured him in a wild brown wig. It wasn’t much of a stretch. A dab of lipstick. He had an androgynous face, fine-featured and smooth-skinned. “I’ve been told he was a gambler,” I said. “Which is worrisome. Is that what you meant when you said he thought you were too timid?”

“Not necessarily or exclusively. We definitely don’t—didn’t—agree about ethics: business, professional, personal. We didn’t even like the same music. Which is not to say that gambling wasn’t a dangerous component of our incompatibility. Markers, like pipers, must be paid. But Jesse wasn’t one to agonize over the future or contingencies. Agonizing over anything was one job Jesse had no trouble delegating.”

I wondered if he could speak this way—full and flowery sentences and no hesitations—on any subject, or whether Jesse Reese in all his permutations had been discussed until the subject was as polished as the man’s carved desk. I pondered this while looking at the photo on the console behind Ray Palford’s desk. No pageant contestants here. His was a silver-framed portrait of three polished children, a woman straight out of
Town and Country,
and a man who looked like him, except for the mustache. He noticed what I was looking at. “A lovely family,” I murmured.

“Thank you. It is a great comfort to have managed one partnership that worked out.” He fingered his smooth upper lip. “I still feel naked. My dog didn’t recognize me.” He chuckled. “Now, where were we again?”

I looked at his smooth face. The better to impersonate a woman, my dear? “So, ah, given your differences,” I said, “can I ask how the two of you ever became partners?”

“Much in the same way people who later divorce get married. We noticed the things that turned out not to matter and failed to notice the things that did matter. I thought the sum would be better than its parts. I have the analytic skills and I’m good at following things through, paying attention to details. Jesse had an excellent intuitive mind plus a quick wit and an easy way with people. An appealing combination, in theory.”

“But the things you failed to notice?”

He stood up. I was afraid my time was up, but he instead paced the rug. “The greed, the gambling, the womanizing—oh, especially the choice of Miss Bloodsucker as his wife, which escalated and intensified all of the above but still, I thought, belonged to his personal life and was no business of mine, but I was woefully innocent and therefore incorrect about that. The man’s only ethical doctrine is to always pay his debts, a definite virtue, to be sure, but less so if and when accounts have to be churned in order to do so, or values compromised in order to make the money to pay the debts.”

Apparently, when started, the man did not need to breathe. He spoke like a Teletype machine.

“We shared overhead and research fees and the like but had separate lists of clients. Which is why it took being presented with a lawsuit before I realized what was going on. He had been borrowing from the general fund, from our own retirement fund. He had clients whose tiny life savings he risked or squandered—”

“Oh, no!” I said. “So it is, really and truly, possible!”

He raised his eyebrows again. “Off-the-record, remember? Because when one of those clients sued us, I also filed suit and severed the partnership of Reese and Palford. You know what they were calling us? Fleece and Pilfer. Can you imagine how it feels to have your name and reputation tarnished so unfairly?”

“And the lawsuit continues?” I asked.

He shook his head and made a half shrug. “Not that one. That woman died, and then nobody could prove anything coherent about what assets she may have had. Her heir was a disoriented relative—a sister, as I recall—who didn’t pursue the logical course of action. I, of course, did not insist. Still, you can understand why I wanted no further association with the man.”

I felt ill. She had been telling the truth, telling everyone, telling the policeman on the beat, telling passersby, telling it for years, but in the same disorganized fashion that had kept her from successfully suing Reese. All Jesse’s victims now had a face—Georgette’s—seared and defeated.

But the lawsuit I had meant was the one he had filed against his erstwhile partner. The lawsuit that was still pending after three years. Palford seemed capable of carrying a long-term hate. And I wondered, too, whether it was more expedient to sue the estate than the living man.

He glanced at his watch again.

I stood up. “You’ve been generous with your time,” I said. “I guess it’s best to know the truth, awful as it is. It feels even worse to speak so ill of the dead, after what happened to him. I really didn’t want it to be true.”

“Well, somebody certainly did.”

“I don’t think it was that woman they have in jail,” I said. “She said she didn’t even know him.”

He raised both his eyebrows and looked diabolically amused. “If I were the police, I’d cherchez la femme, but la other femme. I’d cherchez la iron maiden. A very angry, insulted iron maiden with a bad, bad temper and enormous, deluded ambitions, la femme whose husband flagrantly cheats and—to add insult to injury—commits the
real
sin, which is to lose their money.”

“His
wife
?” I said, with much too much forced naiveté. I silently apologized to Harriet Vane, who would never have taken on this role of dummy. Was this a real case of using a name in vane?

Ray Palford shrugged. “Who knows? Ultimately, who cares? Trust me, my dear, his loss is nothing to grieve over. What I mind is that his death has once again linked my name with his in news stories. And that is all I will say on the subject, which means, therefore, this is the end of the interview.”

* * *

En route to the jail, I stopped to buy Sasha prison panties. My affordable choices were divided between the garish, the pathetic, and the overly utilitarian. I picked through a pair with pitchfork-bearing devils stamped around the bikini line, a black and red pair with strategically placed hearts and flowers that didn’t seem suited for solitary incarceration, and a cotton pair that might as well have had
Institutionalized
stamped on them. I finally decided that a pair saying
This is the day we wash our clothes
was the least likely to depress upon wearing or discarding. Even this purchase stretched my shaky budget. I had an ominous sense that I was heading for financial catastrophe. I was probably going to have to pay for my hotel room, plus Lala and Belle’s telephone calls, plus the gas back and forth today, plus who knew what else ahead. I’d change my name to Mandy Pauper. I got so depressed about my perpetually pathetic finances that I returned to the hotel and snagged the shampoo and soap offerings, rather than buy large varieties of those items. “Little bottles are more optimistic,” I told Sasha a few minutes later.

“They’ll set bail tomorrow.” Her expression was dark.

“Tomorrow!” I was surprised and delighted. Nothing on the faces of the officials I’d encountered had led me to believe they would release her in their lifetimes. “Tomorrow!” I repeated.

“Keep sounding like Orphan Annie,” Sasha said, “and I will actually commit murder.” She exhaled and looked a bit relieved. “You know anything about bail?” she asked. “Do I have to pay interest for the loan? Oh, I must, or why would they give it to me? Geez, I was just getting ahead a little. Now I don’t know if I’ll get rehired by the saltwater taffy people and I’ll have this miserable bail to pay for and how the hell did this happen? And you forgot my trashy book, too.”

“Did not.” I extracted the book. “From my own personal collection. Vacation reading from Philly Prep to you. Genuine, one hundred percent trash. Check it out. It has an all-verb blurb. Says it will make you shudder, throb, and pulsate.”

“I’ve done enough of that for a while. It’s expectations like those that got me in here in the first place. Tell me what I don’t already know about.”

I told her everything I knew—precious little, when I said it out loud—and what I didn’t know for sure, but strongly suspected, which was that Reese’s feeble ethics had disappeared altogether once Palford was out of the picture, until finally he was not only mismanaging, but manipulating the old folk’s funds.

“I don’t know about money,” she said, “but I know about scams. Remember Riley?”

“I’ve never been sure whether that was his first or last name,” I said.

“That was his both. Riley No Middle Name Riley. His parents weren’t famous for having great imaginations.”

I did remember Riley was the scam artist, successful and dangerous because of his astounding charm.