Generous Death

by Nancy Pickard

  A few minutes of unhappy silence passed while we considered that mystery and the waitress delivered our salads.

  “If it’s any comfort,” Mr. Ottilini said when the waitress was gone, “Arnie’s plan was to work with us to see if he couldn’t help us come up with alternate financing for the museum.”

  “Big of him,” Roy said, but I thought he was somewhat mollified. His old friend had not totally let him down.

  “Well, that’s all very nice,” Jack Fenton said, a shade irritably, “but that doesn’t help much now, does it? I swear, if he weren’t already dead, I could happily kill the son of a bitch, excuse me, Jenny.”

  I swallowed my smile. They’re not quite used to equal opportunity employment. Sometimes they treat me like their generation’s idea of a lady; sometimes I’m one of the boys. I don’t care. I give them credit for hiring me at all.

  I decided it was time to earn my keep.

  “Jack’s right,” I said. “The point is, he did it. And now we have to pick up the pieces. I have already told Simon Church …”

  “Oh lordy,” Pete murmured.

  “… and this morning I put my staff to work on contingency plans and financial, projections. In the meantime, you might wish to consider what this means, in the long and short run, for The Foundation and for the Martha Paul…”

  Finally we heard from the fifth and youngest member of the board of trustees. As befits the lowest in seniority among such a group of powerhouses, he’d been thoughtfully quiet up to that point. But now he spoke up clearly.

  “That’s easy, Jenny,” said my friend Michael Laurence, fifth generation president of the Laurence Construction Company. His spaniel eyes expressed sympathy and worry. “It means disaster.”

  Chapter 5

  You were a big help,” I said to Michael when he arrived the next night to take me to the theater opening. He was late. “The word disaster is one I could have lived without, thank you very much.”

  “You look gorgeous in that whateveritis color.”

  “Peach.”

  “Soft and fuzzy. Like that whatchamacallit material.”

  “Cashmere.”

  “Umm.” He grinned goofily at me; I could smell a Scotch hint of the cocktail party. “You look so cuddly. The hell with the theater. Let’s just stand here and nuzzle all night.” He shook his head so drops of melting snow flew off his hair, completely my secretary’s image of him as a soulful puppy. Puppy was sloshed.

  “Don’t come near me,” I said irritably. “You’re cold and wet and you’ve had too much to drink and I’m ready to go and I can’t stand people who arrive late at the theater.”

  That focused him.

  “All in all.” he said, enunciating carefully, “you’re not very pleased with me.”

  And then, oddly enough, he smiled.

  I slipped on my camel’s hair and a peach beret to match my dress and then turned off the lights in the hallway of my parents’ home. Or, rather, make that singular possessive, parent’s—since it was Mother who got it in the divorce. I’d been living there by myself in the years since I’d moved back to Port Frederick. Keeping it clean and warm for Mom, you might say, until they let her out of the hospital.

  Michael and I paced carefully down the front walk that I had not shoveled. I didn’t take the elbow he offered; if I’m going to slip and fall I don’t want to take anybody else down with me. Besides, I just feel more secure standing alone on my own two feet, which is an obvious metaphor for my whole personality.

  “I said, Jennifer, that you’re not happy with me.” He was walking even more carefully than I.

  “Sorry, I can’t talk and walk on ice at the same time. I’ll drive,” I said firmly. I slid onto the cold leather seat of his Jaguar and waited for him, to climb into the passenger’s side. Damn it, I didn’t want to drive.

  “I hate to drive on ice,” I said and started the engine.

  “I’m sorry,” he mumbled, but he didn’t look very contrite.

  I mercilessly ground the gears.

  That got him.

  “I’m sorry,” he said clearly. I backed out of the drive. “Don’t be so mad at me, Swede. I don’t do this very often, you know.”

  “I know.” I slid the gears smoothly from reverse to first and pulled into the street. My anger disappeared, but a knot of tension at the back of my neck did not. “Anyway, you only told the truth. It is a disaster, unless we contest the will and get some of the money back.”

  “Nasty proposition.”

  “Yes, it is.” I thought of Ginger Culverson who had claimed she did not want the inheritance. Well, there was nothing like a contested will to test brave statements like that. But we had to do it; for the sake of the Martha Paul, we had to go after the money we had thought would be ours. Arnie had led us to count on that money for all sorts of things this town needed badly—including a brand new Martha Paul Frederick Museum of Fine Art. With his bequest, we’d finally have the money we needed to wage a court fight to break the original terms of Martha Paul’s will. If we could convince the court that the priceless works of art were in physical danger in that old house, we could get a judgment permitting us to tear it down and build a new museum. Arnie’s bequest was to have been the seed money for that grand construction project, too.

  Disaster?

  That’s exactly what loomed if we didn’t rescue those works of art from that collapsible stick house. One more hurricane, one good fire, and down she would tumble—and millions of dollars’ worth of irreplaceable and beloved treasures with her.

  The world would never forgive us.

  It gave us nightmares thinking about the potential for loss; it had Simon Church reaching for the Maalox every hour on the hour.

  We had to contest the will. We owed it to Rembrandt and van Gogh, to Caravaggio and Rodin and to all the other artists whose masterpieces were endangered by that cold, damp, rotting mansion.

  “I don’t want to talk about it anymore,” I said irrationally. “Let’s talk about something else. You, for instance. Why’d you get loaded tonight? I’m not mad, just curious.”

  “In two words, my father.”

  “Ah, the light dawns.”

  “But not the one at the end of the tunnel,” he said. He slouched further into his coat and the bucket seat. “My father, according to reputable sources, is supposed to be retired. Now you tell me: If he’s retired, how come he flies in from Tucson every couple of weeks to tell me how I’m going to be the first of five generations to run the company into bankruptcy? Retired, my foot.”

  “What does your mother say?”

  “My mother is tired, Jenny. She’s worn out from mediating between her son and her husband. So she doesn’t want to hear about it anymore. Talk to your father, she says, and please don’t upset him as you always do. Mother, I say, you know me fairly well—am I an unreasonable guy? A stupid jerk? A stubborn SOB? I don’t wish to hear it, she says, and don’t malign your father, he’s worked hard all his life and now he wants some rest. No he doesn’t, I tell her, but gently; he doesn’t want to rest at all and that’s the problem. He can’t let go of the business, but I can’t run it and cope with his interference, too. I’m not twenty years old, I say; I’ve been in this business all my life, too. He’s got to trust me or somebody, sometime. Or else let go. Or else come back, take it over again and let me go my own way. And my mother says, I’m tired, Michael, let’s have a drink, how’s that nice Jenny Cain?”

  “Poor Michael,” I lifted a gloved hand off the gearshift knob and patted his knee.

  “Damn right.”

  I applied the brakes, cautiously, to avoid a skidding van in front of us. When I could take my eyes off the road for a second, I glanced at him. In the pale light from the dash, his well-bred features were drawn; the gentle eyes were surrounded by shadows and fine lines, more deeply etched than I had ever noticed before. My heart, such as it was, went out to this kind man whose love I could not seem to return. “If you’d marry me, I wouldn
’t just be getting a beautiful woman,” he had once teased. “I’d be getting an M.B.A. from the Wharton School of Finance. Why together we could wrest the Laurence Construction Company from the snapping jaws of my creditors.”

  The Jag straightened itself out of a skid. Trust, I decided then and there, is a man allowing a woman to drive his beloved and costly sports car on icy roads. Marriages have survived on less faith than that.

  “I’m thinking of selling my house, Jen, and moving into a smaller place.”

  “Oh dear, surely it can’t be that bad, not yet…”

  “It is. According to dear old Dad, of course, it’s all my fault. It seems to have escaped his notice that when I took over, housing starts were at an all-time low, mortgages were impossible to get, nobody was building or buying, and labor and material costs were sky-high, which they still are, I might add. He ran the company during the boom years. Hell, you had to be an idiot not to get rich then. But since then, a man’s had to be a genius just to keep from going bust.”

  On that happy note we pulled up to the circle drive of the freshly built, gaily lighted Moshe Cohen Theater for the Dramatic Arts.

  “Where is everybody?” Michael said.

  I could hardly believe there were no crowds at the entrance. A few patrons seemed to be coming out, not going in. The lone car in the drive was Moshe’s silver stretch limo, with no chauffeur in sight. I checked the clock on the dash.

  “Oh, Michael, we have missed the curtain. Damn it! I guess that accounts for it; everybody’s inside.”

  But still, something felt wrong. I had one of those absurd moments of paranoia that everyone gets at one time or another before a big party.

  “This is the right night, Isn’t it?” I said.

  “Of course it is, look at the marquee.”

  I looked.

  “Port Frederick Premiere!” it bragged. “Fiddler on the Roof, Starring…” And it named the famous Broadway actor for whom Moshe had paid a king’s ransom for this first proud week. Of course it would be Fiddler. Opening night had been sold out for weeks. Moshe’s premiere was to be a grand social event, the only one Poor Fred had seen in some time. It was not, as they said in the beauty shops, to be missed.

  “So where is everybody?” I demanded. A funny feeling in my stomach told me something had gone awry, but oh, I hoped not. For Moshe’s sake, I hoped not.

  I drove slowly around the building and into the parking lot on the west side.

  “There’s your crowd,” Michael said quietly. And soberly.

  An eerie scene lay before us, as on an outdoor stage. Small clumps of people stood about in their overcoats like bit actors in a crowd scene; the principals moved with sure and purposeful strides across the icy pavement like stars who know their lines, having practiced this same scene many times before. Over it all was cast a luminous red glow—a reflection in the snow of the swirling lights of the police cars that had gathered at the side door.

  With my heart in my mouth, I parked and we climbed out. Distraught voices carried to us over the crisp air. “It’s not fair!” we heard a woman wall. “It’s not fair!”

  It was Francie Daniel and just as we recognized her, she spotted us.

  “Jennifer!”

  Her voice had a desperate edge that unnerved me. Quickly, I trotted to her side. I didn’t know Francie all that well because she’s of my mother’s generation, but she’s one of the few who’d stuck by Mom all those years. I was fond of her, and grateful. When I reached her side, she clung to my right arm with both of her hands.

  “Moshe’s dead,” she said to my horror. “It’s not fair! It’s not fair!”

  “We rode over with Moshe from the cocktail party,” Francie’s husband said. Stanley Daniel’s face, like his wife’s, was pale with shock and his eyes were red-rimmed. Michael placed a comforting hand on his shoulder and I wrapped an arm around Francie.

  “Moshe?” I said weakly. Neither Michael nor I seemed able to find our voices; they were lost in a fog of shock and dismay. But I remember thinking, Not Moshe, not dear funny Moshe …

  Stanley was explaining to the police.

  “He had too much to drink at the pre-party, Moshe did, and we noticed he was a little wobbly. And we wanted to make sure he’d be okay, so we rode over here with him.”

  “Jenny,” Francie whispered, “he was almost passed out when we got here, but he wouldn’t let us take him home. He just insisted on going in …”

  “So we sat him down in one of the seats in the theater,” Stanley continued, “and Francie went to call his doctor because we were really worried about him and I went for a glass of water for him …”

  “And when we got back to him, he was—oh, Jennifer, he was …”

  Dead.

  It wasn’t fair. Not fair for Moshe Cohen to have died on the biggest night of his life. Not fair for poor Francie to come upon the death of a friend twice in one week.

  They thought he’d had a heart attack. So did the stagehands who came running to help. So did the director and the great actor from Broadway. And so, when they accompanied the ambulance just to be helpful on this night of bad traffic and slick streets, did the police. Until, that is, they went through the pockets of Moshe’s tuxedo and found the odd little poem.

  It had a nasty anonymous tone to it, just like the poem found earlier that day in a crack of the Testered Bed With an Alcove at the Martha Paul Frederick Museum of Fine Art.

  Chapter 6

  They were mean, smirking lines of doggerel. I didn’t see them until later, of course, since they were evidence the police did not choose to share with us the night Moshe died.

  In fact, I didn’t know of their existence until the next morning when two policemen stopped by the office. Derek and I were there alone, sharing coffee and memories of Moshe. It being Saturday, I’d allowed myself the informality of wearing jeans and a red sweater that prompted Derek to recommend a bodyguard; he would, he said, be glad to volunteer for the job. There was a time, when I first hired him, that Derek made it plain he’d like to see me as more than a boss. I made it equally clear that I might sometimes mix business with pleasure, but not with my employees. He might have been a pleasure, too. Though younger and shorter than I, he’s an appealing imp with his curly blond hair and elfin smile. He’s also a smart, ambitious man and, as he loves to point out, one sexy little devil. Being nobody’s fool, however, he proceeded to maintain a respectful if amused distance. The Foundation could only afford to pay him a fraction of his worth; I knew he would move on when he got a better offer. Meanwhile, I appreciated and trusted him.

  I was more surprised than he when the two visitors in overcoats and business suits presented their badges to us.

  “Geof Bushfield?” I hesitated before I held out my hand to the tall cop I thought I recognized. If he was who I thought he was, I wasn’t sure I was glad to see him again.

  “Hello, Jenny.” He returned my handshake with a firm grip and a lopsided grin. “You look surprised to see me.”

  “Well, I am,” I said, taken aback. Then I realized how rude that might sound, so I added quickly, “I mean, it’s been years and years—since high school, I guess.”

  “Is that it?” Now his grin seemed to mock me a little and himself a lot. “Is that why you’re so surprised to see me? And here I thought maybe it was because I’m the last person on this earth you ever thought would turn out to be a cop.”

  His younger partner looked startled. Derek looked intrigued.

  “Well…” I shrugged. “You said it, not I.”

  “Thought I’d be on the other side of the bars, didn’t you?” He removed his overcoat—I wondered how he could afford a Burberry—slung it over the back of a chair and sat down. He grinned. It was an incredibly infectious grin, impossible not to return. He waved his partner to a chair. “I know you’ll feel safer now, Jenny, knowing that little Geoffrey Bushfield is the guardian of your public streets and morality.”

  “Have a seat,” I said, “won’
t you?”

  “Thank you,” he said, straight-faced. “These days, I know that only means sit down. It doesn’t mean I should take a chair home with me.”

  “Good,” I said, equally poker-faced. “We can’t afford to buy new chairs.” Then I couldn’t stand it anymore. “My God, Geof, you’re a cop!”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He smiled. His voice had the slow, calm drawl of somebody who takes his own sweet time. It matched the sense of, not arrogance exactly, but confidence that he exuded and which seemed to emanate from some core of him. “And you, Jenny—it looks to me as if you’re still the girl most likely to succeed. I’m glad to see you doing so well, although everybody always knew you would.”

  I felt oddly flustered. Irrelevantly, I thought of a poster I’d seen: “I know I’m efficient,” it said, “tell me I’m beautiful.”

  “Thank you.” I fiddled with the papers on my desk, then made my hands lie flat and still on the arms of my chair. I looked across my desk at him. The Geof Bushfield I remembered from high school was a wickedly good-looking kid who was, however, a shade too wild and rebellious to be popular, even for those loose days when we were growing up. I was a freshman when he was a senior, and, like most of the girls, I’d been a little scared and scornful of “that crazy Bushfield.” He’d been a misfit who ran with a tight, defensive crowd of other kids who didn’t quite fit in. Now I saw that in the thousand years since then, he’d grown up to be not only tall and a cop, but also a disturbingly attractive man with the lean look that spoke of good health and the outdoors and—though surely it couldn’t be—character. It was extremely irritating to discover that little Geoffrey Bushfield still made me nervous.

  “Why are you here?” I said.

  The cool, intelligent eyes registered my every nervous twitch, but didn’t seem to be laughing at me.

  “You wouldn’t have some more of that coffee, would you?” he said casually. While Derek played Stepin Fetchit, we belatedly made introductions all around. The other cop’s name was Ailey Mason; I got the impression he was only tagging along to see how the big boys did things. He was young—maybe twenty-three—but he looked impressed with himself anyway. He moved stiffly, as if he couldn’t unbend. He seemed to approve when Geoffrey the Cop finally got down to business with Jennifer the Executive Director.