Madam of Maple Court (6 page)

It was almost three months before Pam finally got up the courage to look through Vin's office for any of the information Mark had alluded to. Oren Stevens had called frequently, keeping her abreast of the developments at the agency, and several times he'd asked her to come into the city to sign papers. However, it was all just dotting the i's and crossing the't's necessary to close the business down. He'd asked her whether she wanted to go through Vin's office but she declined, so he'd packed up several large boxes and had them delivered to the house.

Mark had also called from time to time but he kept saying that she could let any investigating slide, so she kept putting it off. What if she found that he'd been doing something illegal? What if he'd been being blackmailed or something? What if any of the things she signed in ignorance would get her into some kind of trouble? She was sure that whatever she found wouldn't make her happy and so she delayed, and delayed, and delayed.

It was now almost four months since Vin's death and she was surprised at how little she'd mourned. She was sad, and confused, and lonely, but she kept waiting for the deep pit of grief that she thought she ought to be feeling. Day after day she examined her soul, but that misery just wasn't there. She wasn't happy, but she wasn't devastated, either. The membership at the country club had another six months to run and the people had been supportive and urged her to get back into the swing of things, so she'd slowly begun doing some of the things she'd done before.

She spent her days playing bridge, which bored her a little, and had quickly gotten back to her work with her favorite charities. In the beginning she'd joined because Vin insisted that mingling with the rich and dedicated would be good for his image, but from the beginning she'd enjoyed the work: keeping up with mailing lists, designing Web sites, and particularly planning fundraising functions for anywhere from a dozen to several hundred people, a skill she honed with the frequent gatherings she organized for Vin. She became a prominent hostess, someone a group could come to. Occasionally she donated the use of her home and she quickly discovered that she was good at that kind of enterprise and earned a lot of praise from those around her. No one questioned the fact that since Vin's death, although she donated her time, she no longer wrote large checks to the various organizations.

At first the women she worked with were solicitous and careful not to mention Vin, but eventually they began to treat her easily. None of the women were friends, exactly, but they were familiar. The women she'd been close to earlier when they lived in White Plains all had children and they had less and less in common, so they eventually drifted apart. Real friends, people she could talk to about serious things like feelings and fears, didn't exist.

Now that she had a little distance from her husband she found she was able to organize her thoughts and think more clearly about her marriage. Who was this man she had been married to for all those years? Did she know him? As she thought about it she realized that, over the past few years, they'd led separate lives, intertwined yet distant, twin circles with only tiny overlaps.

Vin had his business and it had taken inordinate amounts of his time. He was seldom home before ten or eleven, attending business dinners, taking prospective clients to sporting events and Broadway shows, working on campaigns until all hours. Of course they often entertained together and she had learned to love Broadway, although sports still left her cold so Vin went on forays to Yankees or Knicks games without her.

Did she love him?
How did that question get into my brain?
she asked herself as she finished her shower one morning. However it got there, it was a valid question, one she could now think about with some objectivity. Love? She wasn't sure she knew what the word meant. Didn't love include trust? She been worried for months that he'd been doing something illegal and so she'd put off looking through his things for fear she'd find out something she didn't want to know. But wouldn't she jump to his defense if she loved him? Wouldn't she immediately and vigorously deny that he could have been doing anything illegal?

It was time to find out everything, no matter the risk. She'd been putting off digging into her own finances, too, and had let Mark handle it all. Strange. She could do a creditable job with the computer programs that took care of the finances at two of the larger charities she was involved in, but she knew next to nothing about her own. That had to stop, too.

The morning was bright and unusually warm for late winter, and as she walked through her bedroom she realized that work would have to begin on the landscaping of the house. It made no sense to let things go. She'd have a good look at the budget Mark had made up for her and see whether she could afford to continue the kind of outdoor work that had been done for the past few years.

She glanced at Vin's wide closet and realized that she'd also have to do something about donating Vin's clothes to any one of several charities. She wondered which one could make good use of his thousand-dollar suits, hundred-dollar silk ties, and the shirts that weren't monogrammed.

Trying again to put off her trip to the den, she wandered through the four guest bedrooms, now smelling just a little musty. As she opened the windows in each to let the rooms air out, she looked around. Mark had told her she needed money. That might be less of a problem than he realized. The furniture in these rooms had cost the earth and she could easily sell the expensive stuff and replace it with good, classic contemporary pieces. She'd have to see whether Carlys, the decorator who had bought most of these pieces in the first place, could be of some help.

She could fend off the most serious financial problems for a while, but selling furniture wasn't a long-term solution. It was time to give some serious thought to what she would do in the longer term. Slowly she wended her way through the upstairs, refolding a guest towel here, fluffing a pillow there. Eventually she descended the stairs and headed for the den, squaring her shoulders as she got closer to the closed room. She had a job to do and it was time for her to do it.

The den/office was masculine, Vin's territory, done mostly in beiges and browns, with moss green, cranberry, and navy accents. She'd always thought the room a little gloomy, but Vin liked it. An oversized seventeenth-century mahogany desk stood on one side of the room, a wall of bookcases opposite. She'd read many of the volumes but Vin didn't enjoy reading. He kept them mostly for show. She was surprised that, at every mental turn, she faced ways in which she and her late husband were different.
Opposites attract
, she thought. Yeah, but once attracted what did they have to talk about?

She sat down on Vin's chair. The desk was much too high for her tiny frame, so she took a pillow off the small leather sofa and put it beneath her. The surface of the desk was a little dusty but uncluttered, with only a desk lamp, a computer monitor, a date book, and several pictures to mar the stark relief. The stared at the photographs: Vin with the head of a major pharmaceutical firm, Vin shaking hands with an ex-mayor of New York, Vin accepting the Ad-Man of the Year award from H&R. No personal photos. Nothing of her. She slowly shook her head. It wasn't as if her dresser was covered with intimate portraits of him, either. She pictured the highly polished silver frames filled with vacation shots: them in front of the Taj Mahal, her in front of a Buddhist monastery, them in ski clothes on top of a mountain in Switzerland. She couldn't immediately remember which mountain that had been.

Stop putting this off
, she told herself and grabbed the center drawer. To her surprise it wouldn't move. Locked. She tried the side drawers but they wouldn't budge either. Why would Vin lock his desk? Did he have secrets from her? Where would the keys be? She thought about his briefcase and personal effects. She'd stored his case and the rest of the items she'd gotten from the police, still in a brown envelope, in the hall closet. She hadn't had the nerve to open anything until now. Well, she had to do what had to be done, so she steeled herself on the slow walk to the closet. Her mind drifted.

"Are you Ms. DePalma? Ms. Vincent DePalma?" the police officer who had rung the doorbell had asked. He'd looked very cold, and snow covered the shoulders of his uniform. His breath came out in little streams of vapor. It had been unseasonably cold that day.

When she saw his face she'd known that her life was about to change and she hadn't wanted to hear what she knew he was going to tell her. "I'm Pam DePalma."

"I'm afraid I have some difficult news for you. There's been an accident."

Not wanting to allow her mind to go where it needed to go, she'd thought,
I wonder who you have to have anger to get the job of telling bad news to unsuspecting wives
. She wanted to make it easier for him. "He's dead," she said, her voice flat.

"I'm so sorry for your loss. He was on the Hutch, doing in excess of the limit in the snow, and his car went out of control and hit a bridge abutment. I'm so sorry."

She looked at the cop. He was probably no more than twenty, with a baby face, flaming red hair, and cheeks full of freckles. Funny, she must be numb. All she could think of was comforting him. When she didn't react immediately, the cop said, "Is there someone I can call for you? Family, a friend, someone from your church?"

"There's no one I need right now," she said. Was there someone she wanted to be with at this moment? She couldn't think of anyone. "It's okay. I'll be all right." She'd ushered him out and sat in the living room for a long time.

The following morning a police detective had taken her to identify her husband's remains. It wasn't the real thing, just a photograph of his face, and she could barely make out his features through her tears. The detective had put his arm around her shoulders and she'd accepted the comfort he'd offered. "That's my husband."

He'd given her a cup of coffee and suggested that she might want to see her physician and have the doctor prescribe a sedative, then he'd handed her Vin's briefcase and a fat brown envelope with Vin's personal effects inside. She'd seen the doctor, filled the prescription he'd given her, and, except for the funeral arrangements, most of which Mark had taken care of for her, and the actual event, she'd slept for more than a week. She'd spent the following week in a fog, taking antidepressants like they were candy, hoping that each morning the emptiness would lessen. Emptiness. Not sadness but an overall purposelessness. What should she do? The heads of each of her charities had called, expressed their sympathy, and told her that she should take her time getting back, if she went back at all. They spouted platitudes and told her how much they sympathized, but she got the feeling that they were thinking,
Thank God it's not me
. Both Doug Haskell and Walt Roth had called to offer their condolences. She answered all the calls with brief good grace.

Had it been almost four months already? She opened the closet door and pulled the envelope down from the shelf. She returned to the desk, tore the envelope open, and spilled the contents on the desktop. His cell phone and his personal organizer. His watch. A Lucian Piccard day, date chronograph. She'd given that to him for their tenth anniversary. She looked at the back. MTYLTT. More than yesterday, less than tomorrow. Had she meant that then? Did it really matter? He was gone and that was that.

She put the watch back on the desk and picked up his wallet. Eel skin. That had been for his twenty-ninth birthday. He'd dropped hints for weeks, saying that everyone who was anyone had eel skin wallets. Six hundred dollars later he had one, too, with his initials in gold on the front. His cufflinks, gold and ruby. He had a dozen pair with different stones, nothing under a thousand dollars. She'd sell those, along with much of her jewelry, to lengthen the time before she had to make a decision about the rest of her life. There was three hundred forty dollars inside his wallet as well as his driver's license, several credit cards, and the other pieces of plastic that his complicated life demanded. She flipped through them. No real surprises there, although what had she really known of his life.

His keys. She picked up the heavy ring. She recognized the front door key, a key to his Mercedes, now returned to the dealer, and her Lexus, as well as the key to his Corvette. She'd complained when he bought it that, since it was a standard shift, she couldn't drive it. "Of course it's standard shift," Vin had said. "You don't put an automatic transmission in a car like this. It would be silly." No sense keeping that key, she thought, nor the key to the Mercedes. She pocketed the key to her car and dropped the other two into the garbage can under the desk.

There were several other keys. She knew he kept his office keys in his briefcase, so she hoped the key to his desk was one of these. She tried each in the desk drawer lock. The third one fit and unlocked the center drawer. She opened the drawer and found nothing of immediate interest. The top two side drawers contained little more. The bottom draw on the right, however, was filled with files. She glanced over the tabs. Vin was well organized, so they were carefully labeled with machine made labels. HSBC Bank statements. She didn't remember an HSBC account. All their personal banking was with Citibank.

She hurried upstairs, found the list Mark had given her, and returned to the den. There was no HSBC account listed there, either. Maybe it was a corporate account. Sure. That was it. It had to be. But why was the folder here and not at the office? She pulled the folder out of the drawer and opened it. Bank statements, deposits of cash—more than ten thousand a month—and transfers to pay a credit card bill. Credit card? She went through his wallet again and found an HSBC platinum Visa card.

She returned to the drawer and found the folder that contained the credit card statements. Some of the charges were for hotel rooms in the city, expensive dinners in the best restaurants, many of which she and Vin had been to. She tried to remember which credit card he'd usually used, but that kind of thing never registered with her. She looked at the dates and opened his date book to a calendar. The charges were almost exclusively on Thursdays, evenings she almost always had committee meetings. If these were clients of DePalma Advertising he'd have used the company American Express platinum card.