Not a Creature Was Stirring(57)

“Like Myra?”

“For one,” Bobby said.

“You know what’s really interesting?” Chris said. “You, trying to implicate Myra in Daddy’s murder. That’s interesting.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You ought to. Myra had the watch yesterday afternoon. She was in Mother’s suite from one until six. I was with her from one-thirty to four. The only way you could have seen her coming out of the study hall door at three was if she’d gone into a trance and thought transferred herself there. And believe me, she never went into a trance. She was beating my pants off at gin.”

The car was still inching through traffic, but Bobby popped his door, swung his legs into the gutter and hopped out onto the pavement. He landed in a puddle, sending up a spray of mud that splattered his pants up to his knees.

Chris transferred himself to the rumble seat, opened the privacy window, and told Morgan where he wanted to go. He felt good again. Oh, yes. He felt excellent. He was at one with the cosmic consciousness, at home in the sea of chance, in love with the spinning of the universe. He was going to hock the hell out of these goddamned candlesticks and then he was going to make himself a killing, the kind of killing you only made once or twice in a lifetime.

The kind of killing that would solve everything. The way killings always did.

He was so hot, he was running a fever.

It was 10:24 A.M.





3


Out in Chestnut Hill, Myra Hannaford Van Damm had just finished going through the papers she’d found in Bobby’s desk drawers. She was putting them back again, haphazardly, not really caring whether she got them into the right places or not. If Bobby came back and found his desk a mess and his papers rifled and got himself spooked, all well and good. The stupid little bastard deserved to be spooked.

She stood up, went over to the makeshift bar Bobby had set up on one of the bookshelves and poured herself a Perrier and lime. Most of her family thought she was stupid, but that wasn’t strictly true. In some ways, she was enormously stupid. In others, she had a touch of genius. She couldn’t have understood three lines of War and Peace. She could, however, read a financial report better than a bank examiner, an IRS auditor, or a computer.

She dropped into a leather wing chair and considered her present problem. It wasn’t the fact that Bobby had been embezzling from Hannaford Financial that bothered her. She’d been embezzling from Dickie Van Damm for ages. Over the past three years, she’d relieved her darling and thoroughly obtuse husband of well over half a million dollars—and got it right out of his checking account, too, where he should have noticed it. Because Dickie hadn’t the faintest idea of how to balance his checkbook, he never would. If Daddy hadn’t discovered what she was doing, she could have gone on with it for another three years. By then, she’d have had enough in secret bank accounts to walk out on her marriage. She wouldn’t have had to worry about settlements or delaying tactics or Pennsylvania’s quaint little custom of allowing for contested divorce.

She got up again and went back to the bar, watching her face in the mirrored surface of the bottle tray as she poured another Perrier. She was beginning to worry about Bobby’s mental health. She really was. What he had done—well, she could hardly believe it. Fake customer orders. Fake stock certificates. Fake bonds. Fake everything—and it all looked fake, too, as phony as a Main Line accent on a Brooklyn-born real estate developer. It was as if Bobby was trying to get himself caught.

She squinted at her reflection in the bottle tray and rubbed at a smudge on the tip of her nose. No matter how crazy he made her, Bobby the Embezzler was not her problem. He could embezzle himself right into Leavenworth and she wouldn’t bat an eye. She wouldn’t go with him, either. She’d always been considered much too empty-headed to have anything to do with the business. With the way she’d set things up, if Bobby tried to implicate her, it would be his word against hers.

Her problem was these huge, unexplained waves of cash, these mountains and mountains of cash, that came rolling through the records at unpredictable intervals.

She did not, of course, have anything to do with this cash.

She had not, of course, even known anything about this cash.

If she had, she would have put a stop to it, right away.

The investigation of an embezzlement was one thing. The investigation of stock fraud manipulation was something else altogether. That could go very deep, and get very sticky.

She finished her Perrier and put the glass down on the bookshelf, still full of ice. Then she wandered out of the room and into Bobby’s front hall. Cash. It bugged the hell out of her that she was going to have to save that little asshole’s neck just to save her own.