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And One to Die On(29)

By:Jane Haddam


“For one hundred fifty-two thousand dollars.” Richard nodded. “That’s me.”

“You mean you paid a hundred fifty thousand dollars for a pair of evening slippers? Used?” Kelly Pratt was astounded. “I think you need to get yourself some decent financial advice. Obviously, you’re a young guy who’s made himself a lot of money he doesn’t know what to do with.”

“Mr. Fenster is a collector,” Mathilda Frazier said.

“Mr. Fenster is in need of a tall glass of Budweiser,” Richard announced. “Is there actually a bar around here somewhere? I’d kill for something cold.”

“You have to go down to the core and out of the boarding area and around to the right,” Kelly Pratt said. “I know the way. It won’t take long. When you get that beer into you, though, you’ve got to tell me about those evening slippers. Do you do that kind of thing often?”

“I do it once or twice a year.”

“That must be a very expensive hobby, Mr. Fenster. That must be worse than keeping racehorses.”

Kelly Pratt was out in the corridor, trying to get them started on their way to the bar. Richard Fenster was holding back, to see what Mathilda Frazier would do.

“You coming along?” Richard asked her finally.

Mathilda Frazier seemed to start, and then sigh, expressions of emotions that seemed to have nothing to do with him at all. Then she got her handbag from the seat she had left it on and nodded.

“All right,” she said. “After a day like this, I suppose I could use a glass of wine.”





2


If Mathilda Frazier had been asked to name the fairy tale she liked least as a child, that fairy tale would have been The Ugly Duckling. Mathilda Frazier didn’t like reversal-of-fortune stories of any kind. In her mind, the world was supposed to be an orderly place, where the people who started out being the best went on being the best forever. It bothered her no end that of the women she had graduated from high school with, only one of them was already a really enormous success—and she had been the plainest, nerdiest, most unhip girl in the class, the girl who had never gotten invited to anything, the girl who was considered an absolute square and a bore. The fact that this girl had turned out to be a success in rock music—all tarted up and dressed in miniskirts and bustiers—made the situation even worse.

There were plenty of reversal-of-fortune stories out there, Mathilda knew, and every one of them made her angry. She couldn’t hear the name of Bill Gates without wanting to spit. If there was an up-from-nowhere story about a movie star or a novelist in one of the magazines, complete with before-and-after ugly-duckling-to-swan photographs to illustrate the transformation, Mathilda paged right past it. Obviously, Richard Fenster was an ugly duckling who had turned into a swan. In spite of the fact that he was still ugly—and so badly dressed he might have been taken for a street bum, except that he was so clean—he was impressively rich. All the auction houses had had his finances checked out, discreetly, and those checks always said the same thing. Richard Fenster had money to burn, and he liked to burn it—but all he was willing to burn it on were things that had belonged to Tasheba Kent.

On the walk from the waiting area to the bar, Mathilda Frazier developed a violent dislike of Richard Fenster. She disliked the clothes he wore, the way he walked, the manner in which he tilted his head to the left when he spoke. She disliked his accent, which was a thick south Boston twang. She disliked the thick stainless-steel Timex watch he wore on his right wrist. Most of all, she disliked his arrogance. She was sure it was evident in everything he did. The man breathed arrogance, she told herself. The man sweated arrogance every time he overexerted himself. He was impossible.

The airport bar was a plastic-looking place where even the real looked fake. The ferns in the great clay pots at the entrance were real, but at first sight they seemed to be molded out of polyethylene. The wood of the bar and the tables was real, but it looked simulated.

The bar was mostly empty, so they took a table next to the low brick wall that divided the bar from the corridor. The table was right under a loudspeaker, so they would be sure to hear about it if their flight ever decided to take off. Kelly Pratt didn’t want to wait for the waitress. He found out what they were all having and rushed off to the bar.

“Maybe it’s alcoholism,” Richard Fenster said.

Mathilda Frazier couldn’t ignore him—rule one in the trade was that you never offended high bidders—so she said something noncommittal about their all being nervous. What it was they were all supposed to be nervous about, she couldn’t have said.