“Nothing about Fred Scherrer?”
“Fred Scherrer.” Max was puzzled. “The name’s familiar, but I can’t place it. Is it someone we know?”
“It’s someone I know. He’s a lawyer.”
“Oh,” Max said, comprehending. “The lawyer.”
“Exactly. The lawyer.”
“Not a mention, darling. Why? Was she supposed to say something about him?”
“No,” James said. “As far as I know, he doesn’t have anything to do with this at all. But I think it’s funny. You know. I think it’s funny that he hasn’t turned up.”
“Well, he’s hardly hiding, James. Scherrer’s a famous lawyer. I don’t think he’s been hiding in a hole in the ground ever since your stepmother was—ah—how should we put it?”
“Murdered,” James said. “And Fred Scherrer hasn’t been hiding in a hole in the ground. He’s defended two more famous people and done a lot of civil liberties work that doesn’t make such a splash in the papers. That’s not what I mean. I mean it’s funny he hasn’t turned up about this.”
“About Ms. DeWitt’s memoirs.”
“Exactly. Even Candida hasn’t mentioned him. And that’s odd.”
Max got up and got himself more coffee and more Scotch. “Everything’s odd around here,” he said, dropping the swish. “It makes me tired sometimes, how odd it all is. Does it really matter, if Candida DeWitt isn’t putting this lawyer in her memoirs?”
“It would matter more if she was,” James said. “I think I’m the only one who realizes it, but Fred Scherrer is far more potential trouble to the family than Candida DeWitt ever could be. Candida DeWitt gives good television, but she doesn’t actually know anything.”
“And Fred Scherrer does?”
“Yes,” James said slowly. “I can’t be absolutely sure. I’ve never tried to test it—but yes, I think he does.”
Somewhere behind James, still standing next to the coffee and the Scotch, Max coughed.
It was an uncomfortable cough that sounded a little strangled, and James understood it perfectly.
6
MARY ELIZABETH POODIAK HAD changed her name to Candida DeWitt four days after her twenty-first birthday, four days after the earliest date on which it would have been legal to change it. With the change, she had gone through the psychological equivalent of shedding a skin. The young woman who emerged from the Philadelphia courthouse as Candida DeWitt was not the same as the one who had gone in as Mary Poodiak. She walked differently. She spoke differently. She had a different glint in her eye. She felt like a bird coming out of an egg. Where before she had been hard and smooth, now she was a Personality. Where before she had been brittle and tough, now she was—what? Candida had never been able to put it into words, but it was the part of her that had attracted the richest and most accomplished of men, and gotten her exactly what she wanted out of them. It was the part of her that suited her purposes so well, she never had to be hard or mercenary. Candida DeWitt was a woman who genuinely liked men, in all their maleness. She enjoyed listening to baritone voices yelling imprecations at football coaches. She was made contented by the soft swearing frustration of a conglomerator attempting to broil a steak in an electric oven. She could go to sleep to the sound of a hammer hitting nails. A woman who genuinely liked men and made very few demands on them beyond the financial—in certain times and under certain circumstances, that combination could be worth the weight of Jumbo the Elephant in gold, and it had been. This big house in Bryn Mawr was not all that Candida DeWitt owned. She had a nice tidy portfolio of stocks, a very interesting collection of municipal bonds, and a judicious selection of rental properties to see her through a comfortable old age. Memoirs or no memoirs, Candida DeWitt was set for life.
Of course, what Candida had been engaged in all these years was a kind of whoring. She knew that, although the frowsy little blonde who had come out to stay for the weekend didn’t seem to. The frowsy little blonde was an assistant editor at Candida’s publishing house, and she was supposed to be helping Candida put together a detailed outline of the book she had contracted to write. In the process, the frowsy little blonde—Casey Holder, Candida told herself, I have to remember that her name is Casey Holder—was doing everything in her power not to recognize the truth of just about anything at all.
Candida DeWitt had been intelligent about her body as well as her investments. She had kept herself reasonably trim and reasonably attractive, without indulging in the kind of obsessional dieting that turned middle-aged women into walking skeletons, like Nancy Reagan. Candida knew a lot of women like that. She didn’t envy them. She didn’t envy anyone. As far as she knew, she had a perfect life.