Blood in the Water(82)

“Really?”

“Bankers hours, we used to call them when we were growing up,” Caroline said. “Bankers worked less than other people because they were bankers. They didn’t get out of bed at four and into the office by five-thirty. They had lives, real lives. We sat down to dinner at eight. We went to the opera and the symphony. We sponsored art exhibitions. We did all that kind of thing. You know the kind of thing, because you married one of us. You married Bennis Hannaford.”

“She doesn’t do much of that kind of thing anymore.”

“It’s the way people were supposed to live,” Caroline said. “It’s the way people of good family were supposed to live. And we were people of good family. I’m a descendant of travelers on the Mayflower on both sides of my family. Henry’s great-grandfather gave a library wing at Yale, and his father gave the sports complex at Hotchkiss.”

“Mrs. Land,” Gregor said faintly, “or Mrs. Stanford-Pyrie, or whatever you want to call yourself. Your husband bilked investors and banks out of sixty billion dollars. Billion, with a ‘B.’ He ruined countless midlevel investors. Took their entire life savings. He brought down two international banks. And the last I heard, he was in jail for the next two hundred and twelve years.”

“He’s seventy-two,” Caroline said. “I rather think he’s going to cut that sentence short by a bit. The scam of the century,” Caroline said. And then she laughed.

Up to then, they had been standing in the middle of the open space that was designated as a “family room”—Caroline preferred rooms with doors, thank you very much—and now she dropped down into a chair and stretched out her legs. Gregor Demarkian looked at her for a bit and then sat down himself, on the very edge of a love seat.

“The Susan you refer to,” he said.

“She calls herself Susan Carstairs now,” Caroline said. “It’s Marilyn Falstaff, of course. Poor Neddy Falstaff. He was like Susan, really. He didn’t have the stamina it takes to get through something like this. As soon as Henry decided to spill it all to the police and the FCC, Neddy couldn’t take it, and there he went, right out a twentieth-story window. I was surprised he could get it open. Anyway, Susan needed somewhere to hide just as much as I did, so I took her along with me.”

“And that was—”

“About two and a half years ago,” Caroline said. “It’s amazing how much time has passed, isn’t it? It’s been nearly seven years now since the smashup. And then, of course, there were lawsuits everywhere. Everybody was convinced I must have known all about it. I didn’t. I wasn’t brought up to stick my nose into my husband’s business affairs. And I had money of my own, from my own family. I didn’t see the justice in allowing a lot of—well, people, let’s say. I didn’t see why Henry’s investors should be allowed to take my money.”

“What have the courts had to say to that?”

“That I’m right,” Caroline said. “My money is my money. Are you surprised?”

“No.”

“The only problem left after that was the publicity,” Caroline said. “And there was a lot of it. People yelling at me on the street. Henry’s investors following me from place to place. And the reporters, of course. And the stories in the magazines and the newspapers and on television. And the books. My grandmother used to say that a lady never got her name in the papers except when she was born, when she married, and when she died. I should have listened to her. There were so many photographs of Henry and me at one thing or another, in society columns, in Town & Country. They just get dredged up and reprinted wholesale when anybody wants to write a story.”

“So you changed your name and came out here,” Gregor Demarkian said. “And then Michael Platte found out who you were.”

“It bothered me, that business of his finding out who I was,” Caroline said. “Who Susan and I were, I should say. You never met Michael Platte, of course. He was dead before you were brought in on this thing. But he wasn’t a bright boy. He was a sociopath, that was certain. But he wasn’t bright. And he was not curious. He didn’t paw through old newspapers and magazines. I doubt if he ever listened to any news at all. That’s why I always thought it must have been her who figured it out, and not him.”

“Her?”

“Martha Heydreich,” Caroline said. “She was a sociopath, too, if you want to know the truth. And absolutely the creepiest human being I’ve ever met.”