by Nancy Martin
“Hell, yes, if it gets me some sexual adventure.”
“Libby,” I said, easing away, “I think I’ll go look around a little.”
“Sure,” Libby said. Then, to LaKeeta: “She needs a goddess, too, but she’s a little unfocused right now.”
I moseyed away from the two of them, ignoring another spate of barking over in the grooming department, followed by a crash and a human yelp.
I spotted the stairs and tried to stroll casually in that direction. When I reached a display of flavored pigs’ ears, the front door of the store whooshed open, and Gussie Strawcutter walked into the store.
“Gussie!”
She hesitated, then recognized me. “Oh. It’s you.”
She was dressed for business in a plain navy pantsuit, and she carried a battered black briefcase that thumped against her knee.
“I’m so sorry about Rush,” I said to her, unsure what the rules of etiquette dictated in such a situation. Her husband was dead, and my sister was primary suspect in his murder. But I couldn’t walk away, so I said, “He was a kind and very sweet man, Gussie.”
She peered into my face as if I were speaking a language she didn’t understand. “Why do you say that?”
“I always respected his involvement with humane-society work.”
“And his involvement with your sister?” Gussie began to glare at me. Her frizzy hair was almost tamed by a thick black headband, but her face was blotchy and her eyes looked as if they’d been tenderized.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Until this weekend, I had no idea they even knew each other.”
She swallowed that information with no change of expression. But her voice went hard and accusatory. “Did she give him money?”
“Money? Emma is barely making ends meet right now, and I can’t imagine—”
“I found sixty dollars in his sock drawer. In quarters and dollar bills, mostly. Sixty dollars.”
Gussie let go of the briefcase, and it hit the floor at her feet. She groped for the counter and sagged against it. I realized she was ill and quickly grasped her arm. “Let’s go sit down,” I said. “You’ll be all right in a minute.”
“Not here.” She began to weep. “Help me out of here. I’ll go to my car. Anything—just don’t let me make a scene in a place of business.”
I picked up her briefcase and held her arm firmly. She leaned against me and we staggered out of the store.
Chapter 12
Outside, she took gasping breaths of cool air. “I haven’t eaten anything. Not for ages. I should have had some breakfast.”
“There’s a restaurant across the parking lot.”
“No, that place is too expensive. There’s a bagel shop . . .”
I saw the bagel shop only two doors down in the strip mall. In three minutes we were inside, and I eased Gussie into a booth across from the display counter. I spoke to a young man behind the cash register, and he brought me two cups of coffee right away. I ordered a toasted bagel for Gussie, and he went to prepare it.
She accepted the coffee without thanks. When I slid into the seat across from her, she was reaching for a paper napkin from the table dispenser. “I’m sorry,” she said, dabbing her cheeks. “I haven’t been myself lately.”
“Gussie, you should be at home,” I said gently. “With everything that’s happened, you need to take care of yourself.”
“I have a company to run. There’s too much to do. The annual report, the shareholders—”
“For a few days, you can trust your employees to manage things.”
She took off her glasses and wiped her eyes with a napkin. “My father always says it’s vital to know what’s happening with the company at all times.”
Her father had been a controlling egomaniac, I’d once heard my mother declare, who drove his wife to an early grave with his obsession for making money. Here was Gussie, similarly driven.
Did she have a life? I couldn’t remember seeing her attending any social events, and I couldn’t recall hearing any people call her their friend. Now she was struggling alone to cope with one of life’s most devastating blows. She obviously felt betrayed and abandoned. I recognized her state of mind.
“Take a few days, Gussie,” I soothed. “You’ll be able to think more clearly.”
She stared at the cup I’d placed in front of her but didn’t reach for it. “It’s been horrible. Everybody’s talking. All the questions, the police. I just want it to be over.”
“I’m sure you miss Rush, too.”
Tears flooded her eyes again. She hiccoughed and grabbed another napkin. She pressed the paper to her mouth and couldn’t speak.
“I know it’s hard,” I said. “He was in your thoughts a hundred times a day, and now he’s gone. Maybe it doesn’t feel real yet, but it hits you every few minutes, doesn’t it?”
Gussie heard me, but suddenly her stare intensified as if I’d sprouted horns and a tail. When she could speak, her voice was a rasp. “What do you want?”
“I don’t want anything.”
“Everybody wants something.”
“Okay, I want my sister exonerated,” I admitted.
“She was chasing my husband,” Gussie said flatly. “You Blackbirds are always looking for somebody to mooch from.”
I felt my face warm at her assessment of my family. “Emma isn’t like that.”
“I caught them together Saturday morning.”
That was why Gussie had been crying when Hadley and I saw her at the hunt breakfast; she’d surprised Rush and Emma together in the stables.
I said, “I’m sure Emma and Rush were only friends.”
“You’re wrong. I saw them together. And I saw the pictures.”
My pulse quickened. “The pictures?”
“She was giving Rush some photographs. I grabbed them and saw. They were lovers. She was going to use those pictures to get money from Rush. But my husband didn’t have any money of his own.”
I wasn’t going to get any useful information if Gussie persisted in accusing Emma, so I asked, “If he didn’t have any money of his own, how did Rush start Laundro-Mutt?”
The question didn’t offend her. “He borrowed it. I told Rush that was a poor business plan, but he had to do it, he said.”
“So he borrowed from Tottie Boarman.”
“That was a mistake, too.” Gussie said flatly. “Mr. Boarman was a very bad choice.”
“I’m surprised Rush asked Tottie to be his partner.”
“They weren’t partners. Mr. Boarman only loaned the start-up money. Then he wanted a return on his investment sooner than expected. He pressured Rush to go public and issue stock. But Rush told him the groundwork wasn’t ready.”
“Did you agree?”
“I had nothing to do with Laundro-Mutt.” She picked at a ragged tear beside one fingernail.
I must have looked as bewildered as I felt. “But surely an investment from you would have prevented Rush from going to Tottie in the first place.”
“Rush understood that all Strawcutter money has to stay where it is. He knew that before we were married. My father and I made Rush aware of our family policy from the start, to avoid misunderstandings. It was the only way to be sure Rush wasn’t marrying me because—well, for the Strawcutter fortune.” She flushed.
I felt a surge of pity for gruff, unattractive, badly dressed Gussie. “I see.”
The bagel I had ordered for Gussie appeared. I wondered if Rush, like all newly married spouses, assumed he could break down the barriers imposed by a prenuptial agreement. After a few happy years of marriage, most prenups bit the dust. Had Rush gone to Tottie after finally realizing there was no hope of easing even a few dollars out of the Strawcutter coffers?
Had he further resorted to blackmail to raise the money denied to him at home?
Gussie picked up half of the bagel and took a bite. She only barely managed to choke it down. She sipped more coffee and seemed to calm herself. “I told Rush not to borrow a
ny money, but he went looking for investors, anyway, and came up with Mr. Boarman. Debt is a bad way to start a business, my father always said.”
“What should Rush have done instead?”
“Saved enough to start Laundro-Mutt himself.”
“But a start-up like Laundro-Mutt must have taken millions.”
“You can’t have everything right away,” Gussie said. “You have to work for good things.”
Poor Rush. Saving the change from his lunch money couldn’t have raised ten thousand dollars in a decade. I did not point out that Gussie had been given one of the country’s most profitable businesses on a silver platter. But looking at her, sitting in that bagel shop, I realized she was miserable. All the money in her family fortune did not make her happy.
Gussie leaned across the table. “You’ve been spared a great burden, you know. When your silly parents took off, they did you a favor, Nora.”
“I guess that’s one way of looking at it.”
“No,” she said earnestly. “You should be glad they spent all the money. A family fortune can be a terrible weight, an awful responsibility. It’s better to have nothing than hundreds of millions of dollars.”
“You could give it away if you hate it so much. So many charities are desperate for—”
Horrified, she said, “I can’t give it away!”
She couldn’t spend it either, I thought. Clearly, she didn’t buy clothes or extravagant meals or expensive treatments at spas. She just watched her bank account grow.
Gussie snatched more napkins from the dispenser and blew her nose.
Almost everyone dreamed of winning the lottery someday. But I had friends who inherited vast fortunes, and their reactions to receiving sometimes unimaginable wealth were not as simple as rushing out to buy a new car. People who had enough money to make the wildest dreams come true sometimes didn’t have the capacity to dream at all. The emotional legacy that came with inherited wealth could be crippling—a laughable quandary according to the average Joe, perhaps, but very real nonetheless.
Looking at Gussie, I remembered a childhood friend who was given fifty million dollars when he turned eighteen. He spent a year staring at the numbers on paper, paralyzed by the opportunities for success and failure the money represented. He’d never have to work a day in his life, and he could have spent every penny pleasing himself. But within a year, he shot himself. His younger brother, in his turn, became a profligate playboy who ruined one expensive sail-boat after another, ate and drank like Henry VIII and had recently been arrested, I’d heard, for drugging young girls for the purpose of having sex with their unconscious bodies. I’d seen his bloated face plastered on supermarket tabloids for weeks. He was barely twenty-five years old.
Different rules applied to the very rich. But the rules had to be self-created, and that task proved too difficult for many.
For Gussie the rule was that she had to keep the Strawcutter fortune inviolate. It was her way of coping with the guilt of great wealth, the mistrust of people who tried to reach her emotionally and the paralysis of purpose that had come with all her millions. I felt dreadfully sorry for her.
I said, “What will become of Laundro-Mutt now? Will you take over?”
“Oh, no. I’ll shut it down as soon as possible.”
“Shut it down?”
“The real estate will be worth something. But the sooner I can stop the payroll, the better.”
I thought of LaKeeta and Kelly, doing their darnedest to cheerfully sell silly collars and bathe obnoxious pets like Spike. Did they know they’d soon be out of their jobs?
I said, “Will Tottie get his investment back when you close Laundro-Mutt?”
“There’s nothing left to share with Mr. Boarman. Rush used the initial input of cash to build the business, and he overexpanded. This morning, I was on my way to Rush’s office to start liquidation procedures.”
Just like that. I’d heard of coldhearted CEOs, but Gussie was an iceberg.
The clerk interrupted us by putting the bill on our table. I reached for it automatically.
Around her mouthful, Gussie said, “What’s my share?”
I picked up the slip of paper. “I’ll buy.”
“No, I want to pay my share,” she insisted. “How much do I owe?”
I showed her the bill and watched her do the simple math very carefully.
She nodded. “Okay, I’ll pay for my coffee and the bagel. We don’t need to leave a fifteen percent tip, do you think? After all, he didn’t really wait on us. Maybe eight percent is sufficient.”
“Whatever you think.”
She opened a thin change purse and counted out the exact amount. She placed coins on the table for the tip. Then she wrapped the remaining half bagel in a napkin and put it into her handbag. That done, she stood up and looked at me with those red-rimmed eyes devoid of emotion. She said, “I hope your slutty sister rots in jail for what she did to Rush. People who steal ought to be locked up until they die.”
I stood up, too. “Gussie—”
But she cut me off calmly. “If you tell anybody Rush was screwing around, I’ll sue you. I’ll punch you in the face. I’ll run you over with my car. I’ll do it, I really will. Nobody can ever know he didn’t love me.”
Her face was very red, and her hands were shaking as she turned to go.
I reached for her. “Gussie, wait. My husband was killed, too, you know. I didn’t understand right away, but I’m finally figuring out what happened to us. It wasn’t at all what I thought it was at the time. Rush did love you. I’m sure he did. I’m a good listener. Call me if you need a friend. Maybe I can help.”
She snatched her hand away. “Don’t bother.”
“One more thing,” I said desperately. “Just one. Can you tell me if Rush had a camera? Did he do any photography?”
Gussie looked at me as if I were crazy. “No, of course not. What a waste of money.”
She left the shop, and I sat down slowly, shaken by how bizarre Gussie had been. Did she realize how her penurious ways affected her husband and her marriage?
An even more jolting thought hit me. Was Gussie so consumed by jealousy and humiliation that she might have killed Rush herself?
I had to find out if Rush Strawcutter’s business affairs were as strange as his marriage had been. I headed for the parking lot.
Chapter 13
Libby was standing beside her minivan, holding the end of Spike’s leash while he rolled in a muddy puddle.
I left the bagel shop and crossed the parking lot to them. “You couldn’t have kept him clean for five minutes?”
She handed me the leash and a twenty-dollar bill. “Here. They want to pay you to never bring him back again. And they offered me a special deal on one of those electronic shock collars. Poor Kelly was going to quit her job. I had to tell her about Placida to calm her down.”
I sent Libby back inside to return the money, and I did my best to clean Spike up with the old towel. He was very pleased with himself. Libby kindly dropped me at the nearest train station and even agreed to take Spike home, although she hoped he could behave himself while she went into her bank to open a checking account for her new goddess support group.
I rode the train into Philadelphia and hiked over to Lexie Paine’s office.
Lexie’s firm—once her late father’s along with several influential partners’ but now nearly Lexie’s outright—commanded three floors of a downtown landmark. The corner office on the top floor, with views of the Schuylkill on one side and the spire of Old City Hall on the other, was Lexie’s command post. She had decorated it with some family furniture—an exquisitely delicate French desk with ivory and gold inlays, and a collection of armchairs from the pieces her mother left behind when she ran off with a polo player. The coffee table was fashioned from the top of a Steinway that had been destroyed in the fire set by one of her crazy Tuxedo Park cousins. On it stood a rosewood humidor, a jokey gift from a senator Lexie helped finance. Lai
d diagonally across the floor, a Tibetan rug glowed in light cast by the gas logs in the fireplace, a cozy touch as snow blew outside the tinted windows.
Over the mantel hung a half-complete oil study painted by a Dutch master of a serene girl spinning wool. Because of the painting, a security guard kept a vigil outside Lexie’s door.
I looked at the painting and tried to absorb some of the subject’s tranquility. When Lexie got off the phone, I said, “Shouldn’t that be in a museum?”
“I suppose, but I like having it around.” She gave me a kiss. “She makes me think if the stock market crashes, I could have an alternative career in textiles.”
“Sorry to bother you this way. I thought I might lure you out to lunch. But looks like you’re busy.”
“I’d love to have lunch, but I can’t get away until the Asian markets open.” She returned to her desk to glance at one of her three computer screens. “Prices are insane today, and the museum board is in an uproar, too. We had some unpleasant business over the weekend, and we’re not sure how it’s going to play in the press. We had to kick somebody off the board.”
“Somebody influential?”
“Yes, and the family’s been attached to the museum with grappling hooks for generations, so it’s going to look like a crisis of faith when he leaves, but actually he’s simply going broke.”
“There’s a lot of that going around these days.”
“Well, it’s very ugly, with bad feelings on both sides. Normally, we’d carry him for a while longer, but a cultural board can’t afford to keep dead weight hanging around indefinitely, and he just hasn’t lived up to his promises, so it’s the boot. And it’s awful. What can I do for you?”
“I just came from a weird discussion with Gussie Strawcutter.”
“No wonder you’re so pale.”
Lexie looked perfect in very spare Armani, her business attire of choice. Her earrings, double diamonds that seemed small and therefore tasteful on a bad stock market day, flashed blue in the reflected light of her computer screens. Her black hair was pulled back with a simple Gucci leather clip. Even in a financial crisis, Lexie looked as serene as her wool-spinning Dutch girl.