A cousin of Nikki’s is coming over. He’s just twenty-three and he’s a love, really.” Her voice sharpened. “And that’s plenty from you, my lamb. Don’t be such a rat, darling. You’re upsetting me horribly.”
She listened again, shaking her head at Fish. He turned to the window and looked out again. It was the scene he’d been sent up to try to avoid.
“Well, you’d better make up your mind to like it, darling,” Dodo said. “Because you’re coming, and no nonsense. Goodbye. Go back and finish your silly game. I’ll see you in Newport in June.”
Fish could see her reflected in the mirrored wall, her face stiff with stubborn anger and wounded pride. There was something else that seemed almost like compassion, struggling to soften and erase the other two.
“It’s so stupid, isn’t it?” she inquired lightly. “But I’ve promised Nikki. We had to have some attraction for his cousin, and I thought she’d love having a young man all of her own. But of course it’s my fault, in a way. I shouldn’t have let her stepmother take her away from me. And it shouldn’t hurt—but it does.”
“Why don’t you let her stay?” Fish asked. “Secretarial school’ll be good for her.”
“And let her marry some bookkeeper?” she asked sharply. Then she smiled and put her hand on his arm. “Sorry, darling. Tell Caxey you did your best. And tell him that if my child stays in Virginia he’s to cut off her stipend. We’ll just see if Anne Linton wants to keep her for free. So run along, darling. Nikki’ll be here, and I don’t want him to see me looking like an old hag. Goodbye, darling.”
At the door she stopped him. “Look, Fish.” She was frowning. “Would you do something?”
“Surely, if I can.”
“Go down to that blasted school and see the child. I don’t want to be horrible to her, but make her see I’m her mother, not Anne Linton. I’ve got to have her in Newport. You can tell her I’m going to break the Trust if you want to. It might make her a little decenter. She was foul to Nikki when she met him last winter in Nassau. And do it soon, before she gets completely out of hand. Another summer down there and she’d let me starve if the Maloney Trust kept on. I’ll call Caxey. Goodbye, darling.”
Fish Finlay waited in the pale-peach and crystal foyer for the elevator. Another experience, no doubt . . . and one he’d be even gladder to skip.
CHAPTER : 2
He saw no reason to revise that opinion Friday afternoon when he came limping up from a culvert with a coffee can full of ditch water to pour into the boiling radiator of his pickup truck stalled on a presumed short cut in the backwoods and rolling green pastures of Virginia. The green Cadillac with a woman and two girls in the back seat, the only mobile unit he’d seen since he left the main road, hadn’t even slowed down when he flagged it to ask the way to Dawn Hill Farm.
“Thought I was a plant hijacker, no doubt.”
He grinned at the New Jersey license plates and the load of freshly dug azaleas in the old truck. They were the reason he was both late and lost. When his sister said she knew a man a couple of miles this side of Charlottesville, a stone’s throw from Dawn Hill Farm, where he could pick them up dirt cheap, he should have known she meant a woman twenty miles the other side, nowhere near Dawn Hill Farm, and the reason they were only a little more expensive than usual was that he’d’d dug and balled them himself. The real folly, of course, had been to let the azalea woman tell him about the short cut.
“Twelve miles from Summerville Court House,” she said. “A green and white mailbox. You can’t miss it.”
He’d give it another mile, Fish Finlay decided. Or if another car came by, he’d stay in the truck so they wouldn’t see him limping. That was the trouble with his leg, he thought, knowing he was being a fool of sorts. Hypersensitivity, they called it. Other people lost worse than a leg in the war, didn’t they? You’re alive, aren’t you? You’ve got a first-rate job, what are you beefing about? You just can’t forget you were an all-Eastern end in your Ivy League days. Nobody gives a damn about your leg . . . it’s your head that counts, old boy. Forget it. And behind the mahogany desk he did forget, and nights and weekends in his place in New Jersey. Only occasionally—at times like this, for instance—did it flash up into his conscious mind.
“Grow up, Psycho. Don’t be a jerk. What’s eating you now?”
Apart from the stalled engine, Caxson Reeves and the azaleas were the answer to that one.
“If you want Jennifer Linton to go to Newport, it’s Anne Linton, not the girl, you’d better see,” Reeves had remarked dryly when Fish reported his diplomatic failure. “And I’d make it as unimpressive and unofficial as possible. Didn’t you tell me you wanted a Friday to go to Virginia and get some bushes?”
He made it sound like a load of stinkweed.
“Azaleas, sir.”
“Then go get them and drop by Dawn Hill casually. Tell Anne Linton we have a serious problem. Keep your mouth shut about Dodo cutting off the stipend.”
“You can stop that, can’t you? It’s a lousy trick. Or is that sort of thing why we call the Trust ‘I. to M.’?”
That came out before Fish knew he was saying it. He flushed under the bleak eyes looking at him. “M. 5401” was the Bank’s listing of the James V. Maloney Trust. “I. to M.” was a top-echelon joke that Fish Finlay never should have heard and having heard never repeated. “I. to M.” stood for “Invitation to Murder.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” he said.
“It so happens that the term ‘Invitation to Murder’ has nothing to do with the Maloney Trust as you know it, Mr. Finlay,” Caxson Reeves said evenly. “It refers to a document that James Maloney drew up and signed the morning he walked out of here for the last time. It is concerned with the disposition of the Trust in the event of the death of both Dodo Maloney and her daughter Jennifer Linton before Jennifer is twenty-two years old. It also happens to be my business, not yours.”
“I’m sorry,” Fish said again.
“Very well.” Reeves got up and locked the conference room door. “To get back to what is your business. I think it’s time you know more about the Maloney Trust. But first—if Dodo wishes to cut off her daughter’s stipend, there’s nothing we can do about it. That’s the way James V. Maloney wrote the Trust.”
He looked impassively down at the empty chair at the other end of the table.
“He sat right there, and dictated to me.”
He was silent for an instant, his eyes fixed on the chair.
“Jim Maloney was a bitterly unhappy man,” he said deliberately. “It may be he was crazy. I never thought so. He knew he had the Midas touch. He parlayed a small inheritance into a large fortune. He married what you might call a girl of the people so he could have a large and healthy family. It was the only thing he wanted. He thought he didn’t have it because it was God’s way of making him pay for the Midas touch. Then he learned that it was only his wife’s vanity and social ambition, and he learned too that Jennifer was the only grandchild he was going to have. Dodo had been through a blatant divorce and a damned unpleasant custody fight for Jennifer, and was embarked
