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I sort of nodded. So far Leslie hadn't even paid for my train ticket, much less lunch. “One of the big questions,” I replied vaguely. Too vaguely. All of a sudden she smelled a rat.

“Wait a minute. Didn't Ron Pearlman get killed up where you live?”

“Shot.”

“That's what started you?” Scorn stalked across her face, and her eyes dimmed down to shadows.

I laughed at her. “Yeah, right. The idea popped into my head two weeks ago.”

“Do you know his payment schedule?”

Rolls-Royce is famous for a quiet car. No automobile in history was quieter than this one at the moment, nor its inside icier. I looked Leslie straight in her violet eye. “No, I don't. And neither do you.”

“Want to bet?”

“You know rumors. It's a closely held company.”

“I have a source.”

“Your source doesn't know. Jack Long is not the kind of guy to share that with anybody, unless you're sleeping with his accountant.”

“You know Long?”

“Sure. We had dinner the other night. Straight shooter. Hates partners. Probably wouldn't tell his own wife what he owes or when he owes it.”

“End of this year. Less than three months. December 31.”

Bingo, I thought.

“Bull,” I said. “You're guessing. I'll guess next June.”

“Eighteen months after they closed the deal. Notes. Something like two hundred twenty-five million.”

I said, “He doesn't seem worried. The man's talking expansion into Singapore.”

Leslie beamed. Dawn was back in her eyes.

“I
knew
you were running a deal,” she said triumphantly. “You're putting him in play. Come on, Ben. Let us in on it. We'll spook his bankers.”

“I don't think so, Leslie. I'm not really looking for partners.”

“Because I testified against you?”

I gave her an unsmiling look she could interpret any way she wanted.

“You don't trust me.”

“Should I?”

“Jesus, you want revenge. You hung this deal in front of me to make me feel bad I can't be part of it. Well, let me tell you something, Ben: Buddy and I will run this one by you. We'll leave you in the dust.”

I had to remind myself we were discussing a fantasy. I had no deal, no plan to take over LTS. It would be funny if Harkin & Locke destroyed LTS or themselves trying to make my fantasy happen. Not so funny if my name got attached; technically, just sitting in Leslie's Rolls-Royce violated my SEC ban. Not at all funny if Jack Long was innocent. “Drop me here.”

Her limousine raced off—in search of a pay phone, so she could call Buddy Locke and start raking Long's bones.

I went down to the subway wondering if I had created a monster. I telephoned Jack Long's office from Grand Central. Jack greeted me in a country-neighbor voice, subtly implying that last weekend's job offer had been dinner-party talk.

I said, “Try to keep my name out of it, but you ought to know that my old playmates Harkin and Locke might make a move on you.”

He waited half a second too long to laugh. “I'll eat their lunch.”

Chapter 23

I got home aching all over and thoroughly depressed. I'd done well in New York, and I should have felt elated. But first on the train and then in the car from the Pawling station, a sense of rejection commenced to linger. I felt old and out of it. Even the delicious scent of wood smoke drifting in the cold autumn evening failed to lift my spirits, and when I retreated into my library and built my own fire, the walls closed in like the night.

Funnily enough, the deal to snatch control of LTS that Leslie imagined me running just might be a way to get back in the game. I didn't know whether I was afraid to try, or was finally listening to Aunt Connie nattering in the back of my head that Long produced jobs and wealth and what right did I have to steal his creation?

I supposed I should report to Rita, but the more I thought about it, the less I had to report. In fact, it was likely that she could have told me half, at least, of what I'd learned from Leslie. Strange she hadn't told me that Jack was scrambling.

I wandered into my office and checked the answering machine. The Volvo couple I'd shown the Tilden Place to the night of the Long dinner had called, politely, to say they'd decided on a house in Salisbury instead. I was shocked. I'd really convinced myself they had fallen for the Tilden place. It made me wonder what I was doing wrong. The economy wasn't any hotter in Salisbury, but some agent up there had managed to close a sale.

The second message was from Rita, and she sounded depressed too, saying, “Ben, please call. Anytime. I'll be up late.”

“Hi. I just got back from New York.”

“Have you eaten dinner?”

“No, I was just getting hungry. I had a big lunch.”

“Would you bring a pizza?”

An evening with Rita certainly beat sitting around alone rehashing my relationship with the fast lane. “What do you want on it?”

“Anything.”

“You don't sound so great.”

“I had a very depressing visit from Ira Roth. They're really going to indict me.”

“Did Ira say that?”

“I read between the lines.”

“He's not known for his bedside manner, you know. He just goes out and wins.”

“I think I know how to read lawyers,” she replied tartly. “He's worried.”

“I'll be there in an hour.”

***

The Castle was lit up like the Plaza Hotel—windows blazing, spotlights scouring the lawns, fairy lights winking on the walks. “Up here,” Rita called from the turret. “The door's open.”

I carried the pizza through the house and up the steps into the cold tower. She was sitting in the observation room dressed in a wool shirt and down vest. “I can't stand going indoors tonight. Okay to eat out here?”

“If you don't mind ice on your pizza.”

She made room on the table for the box and handed me a beer.

“How'd it go in New York?”

“When people talk about Jack's Hong Kong deal, do they mean Ron's chip factory?”

“Probably. It was the biggest and the most recent out there.”

“Did Jack really pay two hundred and fifty million to buy Ron out?”

“Yes.”

“With a big note due?”

“Yes.”

“With something like ten percent down, with the remainder due in eighteen months? December thirty-first?”

“I think so. I wasn't really in on the final details. But December thirty-first sounds about right. Hey, you're pretty good, Ben.”

“At New York rates I'd better be. Thing is, nobody but Jack knows exactly the situation. Did he rewrite it? How's he intending to pay? There's a hundred variables, but my gut tells me he's got a problem. So does the gut of a shark I was talking to today.”

I opened the box, cut through the steaming cheese with my penknife, and lifted out a slice. Rita bit into it with a moan of pleasure.

“Do you have a copy of the contract?”

“Not here.”

“I'd like to read it. I want to see where Jack's head is at.…What's he going to pay Ron's family with?”

“He was hoping to pay cash. That was the whole point, to buy him outright.”

“Could he pay him in stock if he couldn't get the cash?”

“Ron had the option to accept stock.”

“Would he have?”

“Sure. As long as LTS looked good. Which it does.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“I'm not sure about anything anymore.”

“What if Jack couldn't raise the money? Would he lose the ten percent?”

“All twenty-five million dollars.”

“Have you read the contracts?”

“I read the deal memo. We agreed to pay Ron two hundred and fifty million dollars for his Hong Kong operation, plus a two-and-a-half-million-dollar management fee yearly, for five years.”

“What?”

“What's so strange about that?”

“Jack made a big point of saying Ron was a pampered dilettante. Why would he want him for a manager?”

“Ron insisted. It was a dealbreaker.”

“Why? Just to get the fee?”

“Ron was not a dilettante. He wanted to keep his Hong Kong connections. It's a hot city. Who knows what'll happen after the Chinese take over in '97? Ron intended to run the operation while he scouted out new opportunities.”

“That must have driven Jack crazy.”

“He didn't love it.”

It struck me that a dead Ron meant that not only Jack got his wife back, he also got rid of a thorn in his side.

Rita disagreed. “Except now he's scrambling to replace Ron to run the operation. It's a real mess. You know about flash chips?”

“I know people are hoping to get rich out of them.”

“Well, that's where Ron's operation was going. So are IBM and Sony.”

“Lousy time to lose a manager.”

“Even one making love to your wife,” Rita agreed.

“I still want to see the contract.”

“I'll get someone to fax it to me. I can't leave the county.”

“Don't let Jack know.”

Rita smiled. “I have friends.”

***

She called me at noon the next day. “Got it.”

“Be right there.”

Their three-thousand-dollar laser fax had printed a perfect copy on twenty-pound white bond. I sat at Jack's own desk, an inlaid nineteenth-century secretary, and read the ten-page document word for word, as my father had taught me, to save money on lawyers.

I made one note. When I finished the last page, I read the entire document again. Then I took a head-clearing turn around the lawn and read it a third time. I found Rita in the kitchen, staring blankly at a tag-sale copy of Julia Child.

“Did you read it?” I asked her.

“As it came off the machine.”

“Did you see what I saw?”

“Yes. The bastard murdered him.”

Assuming he was broke, the contract gave Jack Long a powerful motive.

If—said a little escape clause on the last page—Ron Pearlman was unable to accept his five-year management contract, LTS could cancel the deal and get its ten percent deposit back.

With Ron dead, all bets were off. Ron's heirs—his father, presumably—still owned his piece of LTS. But Jack was off the hook. He didn't have to pay two hundred and twenty-five million bucks on December 31.

The money business is built on belief and leaps of faith. Jack knew that if he had failed to make his payment to Ron, his banks would have taken a closer look at his entire indebtedness, disliked what they had seen, and called his loans, retiring him to the same hands-tied limbo to which they'd sent Donald Trump and Robert Maxwell and several hundred lesser lights: no more acquisitions; no more private loans; no more shots at cornering markets in flash chips.

Rita looked sick.

“You didn't know about this?” I asked.

“He must have negotiated it after the memo.”

“But how did he shoot Ron from Washington, D.C.?”

“He paid Rose to shoot him,” said Rita, and I had to agree that was probably the way it went down, though I still wondered if Rose did it on his own, betting that Jack would be pleased and reward him. “Who do we tell?”

“First we tell your lawyer,” I said. “Give him something to fight with.”

Chapter 24

Ira Roth's father had owned a feed store next to the freight station. He'd had a reputation during the Great Depression as a soft touch, and another after World War Two as a financier of harebrained manufacturing schemes. He died around 1970, flat broke, loved and admired. Ira, whom the old man had hounded into law school, had spent his life overhearing remarks to the effect that he just wasn't quite the gentleman his father had been. That was all Rita's defense attorney and I had in common.

Twenty-five years older than I, Ira was rich, vigorous, and driven. He wore splendidly old-fashioned three-piece suits, florid neckties, and a trademark gray fedora. He could make a quiet stroll down Main Street look like the third reel of a Frank Capra movie where entered the savior or the villain, take your choice. He kept his main office in Plainfield, by the courthouse, and lived on a splashy Western-style horse farm on Morris Mountain, not far from Rita's. He was pugnacious, as a good trial lawyer should be, and quite convinced he was the smartest man in the state, which probably didn't hurt either. As a child I had found him intimidating. As an adult I had a better sense of his complexities, and still found him intimidating.

“First of all,” he said, when we called at Open Gate Farm, “what is Ben doing here?”

“He's with me,” said Rita.

“He's a witness for the prosecution. Ben, I can't see you.”

“He stays,” said Rita.

“Mrs. Long—”

“He stays.”

Ira said, “As I told you, Mrs. Long, when your husband retained me, I have my best successes with obedient clients. Trust me or hire a yes man.”

Rita looked at me. I said, “We have a theory that Mr. Long hired a private detective to kill Ron Pearlman.”

“In a fit of jealousy?” the lawyer asked scornfully.

“No. To nullify a contract.”

Bushy gray eyebrows rose a fraction. We had his attention. “To nullify
what
contract?”

“Ron Pearlman dead means Long doesn't have to pony up a heap of money. There's an escape clause in the buyout contract, and it looks like Long might be in fiscal trouble. If he had to honor the contract, his banks would have shut him down.”

“That's very interesting. Are you proposing a Carolyn Warmus defense?”

“What's a Carolyn Warmus defense?”

“The defense theorized that Ms. Warmus's lover had actually shot the victim and framed Carolyn to avoid getting caught.”

“But didn't they find her guilty?”

“I was about to mention that.”

He beckoned us into the house. We took chairs in a little sitting room off a two-story living room the size of a paddock. Ira turned his formidable attention to Rita. “It's a tricky tactic, Mrs. Long. If the jury thinks you're trying to weasel out of it with smoke and mirrors, they might easily conclude that you conjured up a farfetched tale simply because you have no other defense. In other words, guilty. Next case.”

“But I do have some defense, don't I? Isn't this worth pursuing?”

“Look at it from the state's attorney's point of view. He has a choice of convicting you—discovered on the scene, with a gun and fingerprints. Or your husband—who, sadly, does not project the image of a jealous fiend—and who happened to be shaking the President's hand in Washington, D.C., the day the victim was shot.”

“What about a hired killer?” I asked.

“Ben, do you mind my asking your interest in this?”

“I think Rita's been set up.”

“Is there something between you two I should know when I'm pleading your case, Mrs. Long?”

“We'll keep you informed,” said Rita. “Come on, Ben, let's go.”

Roth stood up.

I said, “Ira, can Mrs. Long count on attorney-client confidentiality?”

“Of course,” he snapped.

“Sorry, but it had to be asked.”

“I'm not for sale,” Roth replied. “You can trust me, Mrs. Long. If you don't, you can have your retainer back, minus costs. Ben, a word with you, please?”

“I'll catch up,” I said to Rita, who pushed through the door and hurried down the porch steps to her car.

“Ben, I implore you to be careful. This is a very delicate case. Perception is all. If I can't quash it on a technicality, that sexy-looking woman is going to face a jury of overweight, middle-aged citizens who are going to seize, consciously or unconsciously, a chance to redress all their personal disappointments since high school.”

“The husband's P.I. did it.”

“Don't make it worse for her. If the prosecution gets wind of you running around accusing her husband, they'll paint pictures of multiple infidelities that I will not be able to keep out of the trial. It's going to be a circus anyway. Try to avoid joining the animal act.”

“I hear you, Ira, but I get the feeling you're looking through a narrow lens.”

“That's my job, Ben. The last thing I want the jury to see is the big picture.…By the way, Ben…”

Here came a very big “by the way.”

“Have you told anyone about that videotape stunt Rose paid for?”

“Only Rita.”

“Keep it under your hat.”

“Rose told me I'd have to testify.”

“Under no circumstances! You're a prosecution witness who saw the body. If you care for that woman, keep your mouth shut about that tape.”

“Fine with me. Rose threatened to force me to testify.”

“I know. That was the single dumbest idea Jack Long's so-called lawyers proposed. And they proposed some doozies. I want nothing in that courtroom that makes the woman look kinky. I'll have my hands full with the slut image.”

“She's no slut.”

“I'm afraid it won't help to quote you on that.”

“Ira? I just remembered something.”

“What?”

“I told Vicky McLachlan.”

“How about Scooter MacKay? He could print an insert for the
Clarion
. Or do a mailing.”

“Only Vicky. I'm sorry. I forget. It was sort of…”

“Pillow talk?” Ira growled.

“Pre-pillow talk.”

“Well, it would be nice for Mrs. Long if you pillow talk Vicky into keeping it under her hat.”

“We're not talking any more.”

Ira looked thoroughly disgusted and echoed Alex Rose: “With friends like you, Mrs. Long won't need enemies.”

“Can you talk to Vicky?”

“I'll have to reflect on that. Vicky's a smart woman. She knows that testifying about your pre-pillow talk won't be the finest moment in her career. But if the state's attorney somehow gets wind of your escapade, and subpoenas Vicky, she will tell it straight and true.”

“She doesn't owe me anything,” I admitted.

“It's not that. She's too smart to lie.…Or too honest. You're sure you didn't tell anyone else?”

“Positive. But Ira, Rose knows. And if he's protecting Long to protect himself, what's to stop him from blabbing it to send Rita down the river?”

“Look at the bright side,” Ira said grimly. “That would pretty much validate your theory that Long hired Rose to kill Ron Pearlman.”

“Very funny.”

“While I get to tell the jury, She's not a kinky slut, it just looks that way.”

“Do you know about the picture?”

“What picture?” Roth asked in a voice that didn't like surprises.

I described Rita's drawing of Ron.

“A skull instead of a face? Where is it?”

“Disappeared.”

The lawyer sighed. “She probably hid it.”

“She swears she didn't.”

“Well,” he said carefully, “I would hope that someone who has influence with her would persuade her to make damned sure it stays hidden. Better yet, burn it.”

He opened the door for me. “How's your Aunt Connie?”

“Hanging in there.”

“Please give her my regards.”

“Thanks. Ira, how bad are Rita's chances?”

“About as bad as yours were when you went down.”

“She didn't do it.”

“Well, she has one advantage that you didn't.”

“What?”

“Counsel.”

“I had lawyers up the wazoo.”

“Always wondered why you didn't call me. What was the matter? Didn't trust a country lawyer?”

“I considered it, Ira.”

“I'd have gotten you off.”

“Maybe I didn't want to get off.”

“But you were framed.”

“I know, Ira.” I'd been pondering this since New York, trying to understand why I didn't hate Leslie Harkin for selling me out.

“You didn't break the law.”

“No.”

“So why didn't you call me?”

“I broke the spirit of the law, Ira. I plundered. I deserved to go down.”

“That is your crazy aunt talking Puritan claptrap.”

“Clean slate, Ira. I'm not guilty anymore.”

***

Rita was huddled in the car with her arms crossed tightly. “Now what?”

“He'll follow up—quietly, I think.”

“Did he say that?”

“No. But he has to follow it up.”

“I'm scared.”

She said she was scared, but she acted more like mad. Flooring the Jag, she scattered rooster-tails of Ira Roth's driveway gravel. All the way home she treated me to a blistering critique of her lawyer. She dished his taste in furniture—yecho-modern; his horses—swaybacked; the roofline of his ranch house—which she characterized as Wild West so-what.

Actually, Ira had invested a fortune in creating an authentic Western spread, much as she and Jack had done Ivanhoe. Nor were they alone in grafting wacky fantasies onto the countryside. Ira's immediate neighbor inhabits a Norman farmhouse, and the guy over the hill, Reg Hopkins of Hopkins Septic fame, lives in a Tudor cottage under a roof he learned to thatch himself. Of late I had been noticing a lamentable penchant for stucco tricked up to resemble Santa Fe adobe. On the plus side, most of the so-called contemporary architecture was hidden in the woods.

When Rita finally noticed I wasn't responding, she screamed at me. “Would it be too much goddamned trouble for you to investigate where Alex Rose was when Ron was murdered?”

“My next step,” I assured her. “I'm going to check out your alarm company.”

“Why?”

“Jack told me Rose reported that Ron was shot
before
the state police called. When I asked Rose how he knew, he said the alarm company told him they'd heard it on their police radio. I'll believe him after I talk to whoever called him.”

“You're wasting your time,” said Rita. “The alarm company has strict orders to report to Rose every time there's a problem. He telephoned me on ‘raccoon night' twenty minutes after I hit the panic button.”

“Hmmm. I thought I had a way to trip him up.”

“He wouldn't be that stupid. Come on, Ben, you've got to find out where he was the afternoon Ron was shot. Force him to give you an alibi.
Then
trip him up.”

Wondering how I would go about doing that, I picked up my car at her house and drove home.

***

Trooper Moody was waiting in my kitchen, out of uniform. He wore heavy boots, work pants, and a commando sweater stretched tight as shrink-wrap around his enormous chest. I liked him better in trooper gray, which promised, however falsely, that he would be constrained by the peacekeeper's oath.

“Who let you in?”

“Jailbird, you've got problems.”

He kicked my feet out from under me, picked me off the floor, and threw me a long way into the dining room.