“Perhaps I fear the cha-cha, or the tango, or whatever dance you’d do on my mangled body when you’d be done with it.”
“You should.” She leaned against him. “But you don’t cheat, not just on me, but anyone. He couldn’t stop himself. One more bell, and this one keeps ringing.”
As it circled in her head, she sipped some wine. “The fourth wife said there was a woman—a blonde, very young. About twenty. It’s clear she thought old Henry started banging her. She said there were others, but this is the one that stuck in her head, or her craw.”
“The last straw.”
“She said there were others, but yeah, I think this one broke the humps.”
When he laughed, she frowned at him. “What?”
“Camel’s back, darling.”
“Are humps. To continue, she said there was something too smooth about this one, something off.”
“Well, clearly an operator. No woman—all but a girl—of twenty would find a man seventy years her senior attractive on a physical level. I suppose it’s remotely possible, but highly unlikely.”
“So add in the billions, and a well-known weakness for the type. If she’d aimed to be the fifth wife, she missed there, but Henry’s also got a rep for generosity with his side pieces.”
“Do you have a name?”
“No. I’ll try digging there. Number four said she’d seen the blonde a couple more times, and the kicker? Last December—when Henry was, according to statements, showing a lot of mental decline—she saw the same woman in New York. The blonde even smirked at her.”
“So you’re thinking it may be they continued to have a relationship, even if only now and again.”
“Of the four wives, he maintained a civil, even friendly relationship with all but the first. But here, if I’m hearing the bell right, comes an operator. Operators have an agenda. And she’s in New York when the mark, if he was one, and he damn well was, is going downhill.”
“He talked to his last wife about having things put away. So, your thought is he talked to this one.”
“Maybe showed her. But why not help yourself to something when he did? Distract the old man, help yourself to something shiny.”
“That’s easy enough. He might tell someone just that. He’s losing his grip a bit. He might tell someone, name names. Then you’re in the pot for accessory after the fact, aren’t you? Maybe theft as well. When you’ve only to wait. You’re young, he’s not. Add? If you recognized anything inside that vault, or managed to record it, did any research, you’d know very well you couldn’t just sell it off, or wear it around. You’d need a client or a plan to find one.”
“Huh. That’s what you’d have done?”
“Oh, absolutely. And I’d be certain I could prove—true or not—I was somewhere else entirely when something went missing. How do I know for certain who else he’s shown, or told? He might say no one, but he’s old and forgetful.”
“I want to find her. How the hell do I find a nameless blonde?”
“An operator, who may not have used her actual name.”
“Shit, that’s true, too. And she may have just been in it for whatever she could squeeze out of him. Cash here, sparkles there, a trip wherever. But she’s the first serious maybe I’ve got.”
She drank more wine, considered. “I’ll run her by the staff, by the wife, the sister. And the estate lawyer. Maybe she squeezed enough to get something out of the will. Or something on the side of that. He’d have had prenups, wouldn’t he?”
“Of course.”
“I wouldn’t mind getting some details there.”
“I can let Garrett know you’re ready to speak with him.”
“Yeah, if he can fit me in tomorrow, that’d be good. I’m going to have Peabody meet me back at Barrister House in the morning. Add the lawyer, if possible, a consult with Mira. If Lacey O’Ryan gets me those names of the partygoers, I can start trying to dig up the blonde.”
“Another busy day.”
“That’s the job. I’d take double that. Triple it if I didn’t have to do the goddamn fucking shithell of a media conference.”
“There, there.”
