nice red stuff that had oozed out of the hamburger on to my plate.
“What about you?” Annie asked. “I know why old Pamela went into the marriage. How was it from your side?”
“Easy,” I said. “She was beautiful, hell of a dresser, knew how to get off a great line, and I was crazy about her.”
“Well, I asked, didn’t I.”
“There was something else,” I said. “I was young and foolish.”
Annie leaned on her elbows. Her face was about a foot from mine, and it had a sly grin.
“Now,” she said, “you’re up for somebody mature.”
“Close call between you and Cybill Shepherd. You win.”
Annie had something with whipped cream for dessert. I ordered another hamburger, never mind the fries.
“Your client might have made an apt second-time-around guy for Pamela,” Annie said.
“Wansborough?” I said. “You just insulted Pamela.”
“Yeah, I guess,” Annie said. “Except for this cellophane blind spot, she shapes up okay.”
Annie fiddled at the whipped-cream concoction.
“Fact is,” she said, hesitancy in her voice, “about Mr. Wansborough and his gang and your involvement with them, I seem to be experiencing, as of today, this severe bout of ambivalence.”
I said, “One guy you haven’t met, you don’t like the sound of. Wansborough. The other guy you have met, you don’t like the looks of. Grimaldi. What’s ambivalent?”
“You left out I think it’s unnecessarily dangerous for you to get mixed up in any kind of violent nonsense.”
“I rest my case against ambivalence.”
Annie’s upper lip had a line of whipped cream running from one corner of her mouth to the other.
She said, “Alice Brackley’s been really on my mind. I met her only those two times, not enough to get tight with her, but I told you this morning, she was the kind of woman I wouldn’t have minded seeing a lot more. Now she’s dead.”
I chewed my hamburger and waited for Annie to go on. She took her time.
“Supposing,” she said, “just supposing you figure out what’s going on at Ace Disposal, the illegal dealing or whatnot, maybe you’ll point the police at Alice’s killer at the same time. For me, that’s definitely on the approved list as long as you don’t do anything fantastically ridiculous.”
Annie wiped the back of her left hand across her upper lip and looked at the residue of whipped cream.
“How long have you let me sit here with this fine mess on my face?” she said.
“Homey as Norman Rockwell,” I said. “I like that in a woman. Shows you have no airs.”
“Next you’ll let me slaver in public.”
I said, “The contenders for guilty party in Alice’s murder come from a small group and not all that select.”
“You deduce.”
“My conversation with Tony Flanagan helped narrow the field,” I said. “But pinning the killer is secondary to what I’m hired to get done.”
“By me, it’s all that counts,” Annie said. “Who cares about a few hundred thousand dollars when the man who might lose them wouldn’t notice anyway?”
“Wansborough notices,” I said. “Rich men stay rich by noticing.”
“And, by extension, so does his lawyer,” Annie said.
“One step at a time,” I said. “Tomorrow morning, Harry Hein should be able to tell me the nature of the scam Charles Grimaldi is working at Ace. That information may provide the leverage to squeeze Wansborough’s investment out of Ace. Wansborough doesn’t want to leave his money in the company, not when the reason for putting it there in the first place is dead and gone from her office.”
“At last,” Annie said, “we get to Alice.”
“First the money, then the murderer,” I said. “But you’re right, the two must be tied in.”
“You think you can handle both? Safely, I mean?”
“Package deal.”
Annie reached across the table and shook my hand.
26
RAY GRIFFIN phoned before I left the apartment for Harry Hein’s office.
“I bet Woodward and Bernstein don’t get up till noon,” I said. It was just past eight-thirty. I was drinking a first cup of coffee and reading the Globe. It had a two-paragraph item in the Metro section about Alice Brackley’s death. A murder-robbery, the story reported, and gave Alice’s age, address, and occupation. No-frills journalism.
“Who’s this Alice Brackley?” Griffin said. “The story says she worked at Ace and she’s dead.”
“See,” I said, “you really can believe everything you read.”
“This is too much coincidence,” Griffin said. His voice had its speedy quality. “You come around asking about Ace and a few days later one of its executives gets murdered.”
“Are you on the Alice Brackley story?”
“Not officially,” Griffin said. “I don’t cover routine crime. We don’t say ‘on’ the story anyway.”
“What do you say?”
“Assigned to the story probably.”
“Okay, are you assigned to the story?”
“What’s the difference?” Griffin said. “If there’s something here, I’m going to speak to my editors and write it.”
“Something’s here.”
“Yeah?”
“But I don’t know what the something is or the location of here.”
“You must have facts of some kind, Crang,” Griffin said. As his voice got faster, its pitch moved higher. Hadn’t noticed that before.
I said, “When I’ve stitched my facts together, you’ve earned whatever they come out to.”
“If you don’t phone me,” Griffin said, “I’ll phone you. I’m serious.”
“I can tell.”
“At home, at your office, I swear.”
The coffee
