Feast of Murder(11)
Mark nodded. “People are angry,” he said. “They’re worse than angry. They’re out for blood. Any time any of that stuff gets sold, as long as McAdam is still on the payroll he gets a bonus. A big bonus. And everybody knows it. And nobody wants to touch the stuff on those terms.”
“But it won’t last,” Julie said reasonably. “If we wait it out for a year there’ll be plenty of bidders. We wouldn’t have to pay off McAdam. He was in my office half the morning, Mark. I hated him on sight.”
“A lot of people love him,” Mark said. “But think. What’s going on in this place in just three months’ time, if we’re lucky?”
Julie thought. “The takeover thing,” she said. “We’re set to buy the holding company that owns some bank. I have a file on it I’m supposed to get to over Labor Day.”
“We’re set to buy the holding company that owns a whole string of banks from one end of Asia to the other, and a few other things besides. We could use a little cash under the circumstances, don’t you think?”
“The terms of that deal are all set up already,” Julie said stiffly. “We don’t need—”
“I didn’t say need. I said use.”
“What we can’t use is a lot negative publicity right before Jon gets out of jail,” Julie said. “I made him look like a persecuted innocent going in, but with this McAdam thing he’s going to look like spoiled meat coming out. How am I going to face him? How am I going to spend a week and a half on a boat with him after I’ve failed—”
“You think too much about failing,” Mark said sharply. Then he caught his breath, and sat back, and made himself calm down. He really hadn’t been himself lately. He’d been under too much pressure. And as for the boat … “Don’t worry about the Thanksgiving thing,” he told Julie. “He’s been doing that since I was a kid, on and off. Not with the replica. That’s new. But with one boat or another. Jon likes boats. Jon likes you. It’ll be fine.”
“This is the first time we’ve ever been invited to anything like this with your family. It makes me nervous.”
“Everything makes you nervous,” Mark said, and caught his breath again. It was crazy. Maybe he was sick.
The one thing he couldn’t be, of course, was out of love with Julie.
6
Frieda Derwent Baird kept a notebook in her purse—one of the palm-size ones with the little pencils attached, made especially for Tiffany’s—and at the end of every meal she took it out and wrote down what she had eaten. This was something she had been doing for over thirty years now, and in her mind it was “a strategy that worked.” “A strategy that worked” was the kind of thing she said to magazines like Vogue and Queen and Harper’s Bazaar when they interviewed her, which they did about once or twice a year. She was, after all, the almost-famous “Fritzie” Derwent, only daughter of one of the oldest and most distinguished families on the Philadelphia Main Line, most popular debutante of her year, longtime wife of the spectacularly successful Jonathan Edgewick Baird, chairwoman of committees for everything from benefit galas to club memberships. Even now, after her divorce, she was a force in the city of New York, as long as you defined “the city of New York” as that part of the island of Manhattan below Seventieth Street on the East Side and Eightieth on the West and above Forty-second all the way across. She also looked just the way she was supposed to look when photographed in Calvin Klein flannel skirts and Laura Ashley shawls, because she was very, very thin. She was so thin, in fact, that she looked skeletal, and people passing her on the street sometimes wondered if she was dying of AIDS. If this had been anyplace else but New York, they probably would have asked.
Cassey Hockner never asked Fritzie anything. In spite of the fact that they had known each other forever—they had been roommates years ago at Madeira and then again at Smith—Fritzie sometimes wondered if that was because Cassey didn’t like her very much. Maybe that should have been: didn’t respect her very much. Fritzie wasn’t sure if there was a difference. She wasn’t sure of very many things, because her head seemed to be fuzzy all the time, and she had the attention span of a gnat. These things were definitely not true of Cassey. Cassey had grown up and come out and gotten married like all the rest of them, but then she had done what Fritzie thought of as a very strange thing. When her fourth and youngest child was safely in the fourth grade, Cassey had applied and been accepted to the graduate program in archaeology at Columbia. Now she had not one doctorate but two—in archaeology and Semitic languages—and a shelf full of books she had published on the dig she was overseeing, off and on, in the Sinai Peninsula. She also had what Fritzie delicately referred to as “a weight problem.” Fritzie began to feel fat as soon as she put on a pound above 110, and she was five feet eight inches tall. Cassey never seemed to feel fat at all. She sat in the middle of Fritzie’s living room, her enormous bulk spread across Fritzie’s white satin couch like an amoeba in a muumuu, picking happily away at a plate of chocolate chip cookies.