Two Much! (32 page)

Among the beverages on the counter to my left was an unopened quart bottle of Popov vodka. I picked it up and let her have it across the side of the head. And, as she tottered into the stairwell, I plucked the envelope out of her opening hand.

T
HE AIRLINE WAS VERY RELIEVED
when I decided not to be difficult after all. At first I made distraught references to overly steep and narrow spiral staircases, obvious safety hazard, I'd have my attorney look into previous damage suits, etc., etc., and generally I made as much noise and trouble as I could without making any
real
noise or any
real
trouble.

But the airline executives who flocked to San Juan and to my side like sparrows to a suet ball didn't know any of the background. All they knew was that the 747 spiral staircase
had
been criticized by safety experts in the past, and that now they had a dead woman and distraught husband on their hands. A
rich
dead woman and a
rich
distraught husband. So they stroked my shoulders and they offered me sympathy and Jack Daniels and they spoke as emotionally as I did about this unfortunate and unforeseeable accident. (However, they did also mention from time to time that the autopsy would determine the alcohol level in Liz at the moment of her final flight; they did drop that fact in from time to time.)

In addition to compassion for my trouble and a mortician for my bride, the airline did at last also lay on a suite at the El San Juan, in which I was to rest and recover from my emotional ordeal. Once alone in a room dominated by sun plaques, I placed an immediate call to Leek, Conchell
&
McPoo, got through to Gordon Alworthy, the legal assistant who had sent out that package of trouble to begin with, and told him the situation in twenty-five words or less. “Elizabeth Kerner is dead,” I said. “I am Arthur Dodge, her heir and now controller of the Kerner interests. I want you on your way to San Juan by the next available plane, at Kerner expense, to handle the legal problems at this end.”

He grasped the situation at once, as I'd known he would, and made a penetrating and brilliant remark. “Yes, sir,” he said.

G
ORDON
A
LWORTHY WAS
five feet two inches tall and as thin as the ice I was skating on. He had blond hair and blond eyebrows and an open boyish smile and a soft amiable manner of speech and a mind like an Arab oil minister. The airline's attorneys tended to chuckle when they first met him, and to be frowning later when they left his presence. I trusted him as far as I could pay him.

We spent four days in San Juan together, with frequent conference calls to other legal minds back in the New York office of Leek, Conchell & McPoo, and at the end of it I knew I never would have been able to do it on my own. And yet how easy it had been, with Alworthy.

Which was another fact I'd never before entirely understood about money; it buys brains and expertise to supplement your own. I'd gone pretty far with nothing but my own native wit and talent for scrambling to sustain me, farther in fact than I'd ever dreamed of going, and now I was at a plateau where I didn't have to do much of anything any more. If a drink was required, I could push a button and a drink would be brought to me. If conniving was called for, I could hire a fella who'd been taught conniving at Harvard Law School.

How much Gordon Alworthy knew or suspected I didn't know, nor did I care. Even assuming the worst, that he had read those damaging documents before sending them to Liz, what did it matter? If he turned me in it would cost him his job. The Kerner estate would be thrown into a chaos of cousins and uncles, and Gordon Alworthy would be thrown back into the faceless mélange of young assistant attorneys at Leek, Conchell & McPoo. Would he turn me in? Would
you
?

Neither did Gordon Alworthy.

The airline paid off, of course. If I'd been a poor man, an insurance salesman grabbing a week in the sun with his bride, it would have cost the airline five or ten thousand, no more. If I'd been moderately well off, it might have cost them a hundred thousand. But I was rich now, I had so many lumber mills behind me I looked like an exercise in perspective, so what
I
cost the airline was a feeder route between two Canadian cities.

The Kerners already had a Canadian airline—Laurentian Interior Air Service—but prior to this it had been strictly a small cargo carrier, principally of goods manufactured by other Kerner holdings. I was happy that my first act as head of the Kerner business empire was to diversify into yet another area of commerce. The new passenger division of our airline I dubbed Laurentian Interior Zealandia; we did not actually service Zealandia, a a town of two hundred souls in Saskatchewan, but that way the company's initials could be LIZ. She had, after all, made it possible; it was the least I could do.

C
ARLOS WAS GRUMPY AT
being fired, but there was no point keeping him on. I would drive the Alfa myself mostly, or at times I might take the wheel of the Thunderbird I'd inherited from my brother, but the Lincoln I would sell, replacing it with a limousine service on an annual contract for those rare occasions when a chauffeured vehicle was needed. The car would come only when called for, and the driver need not be housed or fed. It was more economical, and more sensible as well.

I took care of all that on Saturday, the fifteenth of September, the day after returning with Gordon from San Juan. Nikki I moved into Betty's bedroom, but I myself stayed in the room I'd shared with Liz; thus I had access without too much familiarity. Blondell stayed on exactly as before.

New York, by and large, had remained unaware of the latest tragedy in the Kerner family. When a major airline wants to avoid publicity, it avoids publicity. A small item had appeared in the city papers, saying that a local woman, Mrs. Arthur Dodge, had been involved in a freak fatal accident aboard a plane bound for Puerto Rico, but no connections had been drawn with the Elisabeth Kerner Dodge who had been gruesomely murdered with her husband Robert on Fire Island the week before. Given no coincidence to worry their heads about, people did not worry their heads. And to the few Kerner relations and friends whose recent phone calls had to be returned, I simply said that Liz had died “in an airplane accident,” permitting them to place their own incorrect interpretation on the phrase. No one—not the airline, the San Juan police, the attorneys, no one—ever suggested for a second that Liz's death had been anything other than an accident.

As to the fugitive, Volpinex, Alworthy sent me a clipping from
Newsday
, the Long Island newspaper, saying that the death of the late Mrs. Volpinex in Maine a few years ago was under renewed investigation, and that the original judgment of accidental death was likely to be revised. “The circumstances were very suspicious,” a Maine sheriff was quoted as saying. If any confirmation of Volpinex's guilt in the Fire Island murders were needed, that was it. (The item, so far as I know, didn't make the New York City papers at all.)

I only had one bad moment that weekend: on Sunday afternoon, when I belatedly unpacked the two
Air France
bags. Unzipping one of them, I found myself looking yet again at that envelope, that same envelope, would it never leave me alone? Would nothing ever—

It was the other envelope. Laughing at myself, albeit shakily, I took it from the bag and it was indeed from Linda Ann Margolies, containing her thesis on humor. What with one thing and another, I'd never had a chance to read it.

So I read it now. Or tried to, I should say. From the first paragraph, the whole piece seemed to me sophomoric in the extreme. I got through two pages before I tossed it in the wastebasket.

On Monday I met with three of the senior members of Leek, Conchell & McPoo. At first they urged me to transfer Gordon's duties to some older and more experienced member of the firm, but I expressed myself as perfectly satisfied with Gordon's performance in San Juan and totally confident in his abilities for the future, so they gave up on that point and called him in for the rest of the discussion, which centered on our handling of the dissident Kerner cousins. Among them they owned no more than eleven percent of the family holdings, but unfortunately their combined strength lay in a few key areas: a major lumber mill, the television station in Indiana, one or two others. It was decided to buy them off individually, refuse to deal with them en bloc, and drive wedges between them wherever and whenever possible. Our goal was full consolidation within thirty-six months. The attorneys were pleased with my decisiveness after nearly a year of bickering between the Kerner girls, and I was pleased with their grasp of the company problems and potentials. We shook hands all around—Gordon displayed his gratitude with a manlier-than-ever grip—and I left.

I still had some remnants of my former life to deal with, so off I went to that scruffy office in the garment district. Gloria was typing a letter to her mother when I walked in, and she looked up in surprise, saying, “By God, I remember you.”

“Of course you do,” I said. I didn't have time for nonsense. “Did we get a response on the sale offer?”

“My, we're in a hurry.” In leisurely fashion she went to the filing cabinet and got me the folder. The attorney, some hole-in-the-wall grub named Mandel, had replied to Gloria's call with the expected unacceptable offer. My prepared response had gone out, and in today's mail another offer had arrived which came closer to making sense. “Good,” I said. I gave Gloria the LC&McP number and said, “I'll want to speak to Gordon Alworthy.” Then I carried the folder on into my office.

How had I ever stood this place? Squalor everywhere. Sitting at my desk, I took out my checkbook and went steadily through the accumulated mail. Some of these people, I thought with amusement, would be quite startled when they received payment in full.

Buzz.

“Yes?”

“Mr. Alworthy.”

“Thank you.” Click. “Gordon?”

“Yes, Art. What can I do for you?” (No secretary delay
this
time.)

I gave him a backgrounding on the Wonderful Folks negotiations, and he said he'd send a messenger up for the folder and would carry the deal from here. Then I buzzed Gloria, asked her to call my sister, and-return to paying bills till the call came through.

“Doris?”

“My goodness, another phone call. Is this going to happen every month?”

“I'm afraid not, Doris. Basically I'm calling to say goodbye. I've—”

“You never even said hello! Fine brother you are. Did you call Duane? You did not. And you prom—”

“Doris, I will never call Duane. I think a Legal Aid attorney would be much more useful to you than I could possibly be.”

“I don't see why you can't simply call him and—”

“I've sold my business, Doris,” I said, “and I'm going to Europe.”

“You
what
?”

“Possibly for a year, possibly longer. I've been feeling the need for a change for some time now.”