Feast of Murder(13)

“Talk to him about what?” Cassey marveled. “About giving up this money you say Jon is going to pay him? Is it a lot of money?”

“I brought him a jar of my melon rind marmalade,” Fritzie insisted. “You know how I’m always making marmalade. I brought him some of that. I only bring it to very important people in my life.”

“I know,” Cassey said drily, just drily enough so that Fritzie began to wonder about her tone of voice. “But it’s hardly worth—what? How much money?”

“Peggy said it was more than twelve million dollars.” Fritzie looked away, toward the kitchen, where she had more melon rind marmalade. She had thirty jars of it, in fact, because last week had been one of those very bad times when only cooking could keep her from eating. Cassey was staring at her. She plunged on. “I wasn’t going to talk him out of taking the money, Cassey,” she said, “I’m not that naive. I’m old enough to know that anybody will do anything for the money. No, I was just going to talk to him about keeping quiet about it.”

“But what good would that do?” Cassey said. “If it really is that much money we’re talking about, Baird Financial would find it necessary to issue a statement.”

“They will now,” Fritzie said, “but that wasn’t the way it was supposed to be. It was supposed to be an absolute secret. After Peggy called I called Calvin, just to check; I didn’t want to go off half-cocked on the strength of a rumor. And Calvin hit the roof. That was this morning. The agreement hadn’t even been delivered yet. Mr. McAdam was supposed to pick it up from Jon at the jail—”

“At the jail?”

Fritzie waved it away. “They all do it. All those men in Danbury. You’d be surprised. The point is, nobody was supposed to know about it. It was supposed to be an absolute secret. And of course Calvin knew there was only one way the news could have gotten out.”

“What way was that?”

“Why, Donald McAdam must have been spreading it, of course. Calvin said that was the kind of man he was. That he liked publicity. So I decided to go over there to talk to him.” Fritzie looked into her teacup, empty now, and reached for the sterling silver pot in its nest of sterling silver filigree. She had to be careful with the tea in the pot, too. There was nothing to say that sugar could only be added to the cup. “I thought,” she explained slowly, “that under the circumstances I might be able to bribe him. Not with money—”

“Not on the heels of twelve million dollars,” Cassey said drily, “no.”

“But there are other things. There are. Especially with someone like Mr. McAdam. He’s a terrible social climber, Cassey, he really is. He’s always trying to get himself invited to things and on the boards of things. He hasn’t been having a good time of it lately, either. With all these indictments, he’s been really out in the cold. So I thought, I’m chairing the Anniversary Gala for the Hayes-Dawson Museum of Contemporary Art. I still have open places on the committee. If he was willing to stop talking to people about this deal of his, I could give him a place. It would be a small price to pay. I don’t like being hounded by people.”

“Mmm,” Cassey said again, and Fritzie got the uncomfortable feeling that she had just said something very stupid. Maybe she had. This whole thing had made her feel very confused and bumbling, and the deeper she got into it the worse it seemed to get. She gulped at her tea again and scalded her throat.

“Well,” she said, “I didn’t see him when I went to his apartment because he wasn’t there, but I ran into him later, around five o’clock, outside the Cosmopolitan Club downtown. I don’t know what he was doing there. It’s a woman’s club.”

“Maybe he was just passing in the street.”

“Maybe he was. I did talk to him about it then. In a way.”

“I take it he didn’t bite?”

Fritzie frowned. “I don’t know if he understood what I was talking about. I was trying to be very discreet about it, trying to go at it by indirection, but maybe I was being much too subtle. He interrupted me right in the middle of everything and then he said the oddest thing. The oddest thing in context, I mean. Considering what I was talking about.”

“What did he say?”

“He said, ‘Greed is the drug of choice for otherwise sober people.’ Just like that.”

“Did you ask him what he meant?”

“Of course I asked him what he meant,” Fritzie said. “All he would tell me was that he’d been trying to figure something out for weeks and he finally had, and then he said he had a stock tip for me. ‘Go out and buy Europabanc Limited,’ he said, ‘and watch very, very carefully what it does.’ Then he started laughing, right there on the street.”