“Mr. Hall’s assets are controlled by the courts,” Wills said, “and yet, he lived here beyond what means he should have had. There is a theory he had additional assets in offshore accounts.”

Cavanaugh said, “No one knows that for sure.”

“But,” Wills said, “if those accounts exist, Monroe Hall would be the only one who could access them. Who would know the numbers, the passwords.”

“Oh,” Kelp said, “and he’s lost his memory.”

•

Kelp sat at his desk across the room from the lawyers and fielded phone calls and arranged for staff to come in for their farewell interviews, which several of them took badly, pointing out years of faithful service, sacrifices made, the decision to stay on with Hall even after the world had turned against him, but what was anybody to do? This party was over. Those few human beings in the world not yet shafted by Monroe Hall were now getting their turn.

Including, Kelp realized, the wife. It was Hall’s bone-deep selfishness that would have kept him from protecting Mrs. Hall, providing for her, writing down those secret account numbers and passwords and leaving them somewhere for her to find. But what would he care what happened, if he wasn’t around? In Kelp’s mind’s eye, a whole lot of hundred-dollar bills with wings attached flew across a blue sky and disappeared over a black mountain in the distance. No, thousand-dollar bills. Gone. Forever.

•

It was eleven-thirty, and the lawyers were just finishing the last of the staff interviews when the phone rang and Kelp answered, as usual, “Hall residence.”

“Robert Wills, please.”

“Who’s calling?”

“Frank Simmons of Automotive Heritage Museum.”

What? What can this mean? Nothing good. Bland as ever, Kelp turned in his chair and said to Wills across the room, “For you. Frank Simmons of Automotive Heritage Museum.”

“Yes, got it, thank you.”

It was very hard for Kelp to hang up, not listen to this conversation, but he managed. Wills spoke briefly, then hung up and said to Kelp, “Blanchard, call the gate, will you? There’ll be some flatbed trucks arriving, in about half an hour.”

Worse and worse. Reaching for the phone, Kelp said, “Sure. Uh, what are they for?”

“The antique cars,” Wills said. “You know about the antique cars stored on the property here?”

“I’ve heard of them,” Kelp acknowledged.

“Technically, since the bankruptcy proceedings,” Wills said, “they’ve belonged to the Automotive Heritage Museum. With the changed situation here, the museum wants to move them to their own property, for safekeeping.”

“Their own property.”

“Yes, in Florida. I understand it’s a beautiful place, glass-walled buildings, views of the Gulf, all completely climate-controlled.”

“They’ve been wanting to get their hands on these cars for years,” Cavanaugh said. “Hall always managed to fend them off, but that’s over now.”

“I guess it is,” Kelp agreed.

“It’s a better place for them, really,” Cavanaugh said. “They have thousands of visitors a year. Here, no one ever got to see the cars.”

“Yeah, that’s right,” Kelp said, and turned away to call the gate, while the lawyers finished their final interview, with a raspy-voiced housemaid who now announced this firing was the best thing ever happened to her, she was going to her own climate-controlled glass-walled building in Florida and live on her sister for a while.

Who did this? Kelp silently demanded of the world, as he made the call to the gate. What clown had to go and kidnap Monroe Hall and louse up what was going to be a very beautiful piece of work? May he suffer, the louse.

62

IT WAS THE BEST day’s sleep Mark had had in a good long time, maybe ever. Partly it was the hospital bed, infinitely adjustable, beautifully comforting, but mostly it was because, at long last, his conscience was clear.

When Os had driven Mark down the mountain from that lodge, Mark had known he was in deep trouble, both physically and legally. Physically, as it turned out in the hospital’s emergency room, that chair had given him a broken jaw, broken nose, and torn ear. But legally, as he was painfully aware, he was in even worse shape.

Monroe Hall and the butler were both gone, escaped from the lodge. Both could identify the lodge, which would mean the authorities would soon find Os, a relative of the lodge’s owner and a sworn enemy of Hall. Even if Os didn’t immediately give them Mark—and why wouldn’t he? Mark knew game theory as well as Os, and the first to turn gets the best deal—but even if Os did the unlikely and even selfless thing and kept his mouth shut, sooner or later the authorities would come to Mark, as Os’s closest associate, and insist he speak out loud in Monroe Hall’s presence. “That’s him! That’s the voice I heard!”

After the jaw and the nose had been set and the ear sewed up, Mark had been moved from the emergency room to this plain-to-barren single room, where he’d had nothing to do but think about the position he was in. A television set hung from the wall opposite the bed, reminding him unhappily of the butler’s chair jutting from the wall at the lodge, but it wouldn’t function until his credit card cleared, which, a self-satisfied nurse informed him, would be in twenty-four hours. You can buy a Cartier watch and only have to wait thirty seconds after the card has been swiped along the doohickey, but in a hospital it takes twenty-four hours. And they talk about advances in medicine.

Well, it was just as well he didn’t have television to distract him, or so he thought. It gave him time to consider his position, and his options. Not that he needed a whole lot of time, nor did he have, on reflection, a whole lot of options. Fifteen minutes after he was left alone in the room he reached for the telephone on his bedside table, grateful that at least this appliance didn’t need twenty-four hours to be activated, and phoned his lawyer.

“Iss is Ark,” he told the receptionist, which is what the jaw would now permit him to say. “Ark Sterling.”

The ensuing conversation was slow and difficult, but he did at last convince Dan Richards, his family attorney, that he needed a lawyer by his bedside, Saturday or no Saturday, before the cops arrived, as inevitably they would. Dan promised to send someone good from a firm closer at hand, but no lawyer had yet appeared when the plainclothes cop came in, unmistakable even without the badge on its leather carrier dangling from his shirt pocket. A bored, slender guy with black hair, short for a cop, grinned at Mark and said, “I’m Detective Cohan, Quentin Cohan.”

“I’ll talk,” Mark said, not entirely accurately, “en ny lawyer gets ere.”

“Oh, really.” Detective Cohan was both surprised and pleased, not having expected juice from this interview. No longer bored, he said, “Fine by me, Mr. Sterling. I got nothing but time.”

Seating himself in one of the two visitors’ chairs, Detective Cohan pulled a crossword puzzle magazine from his casual jacket pocket and amused himself for half an hour until a man who looked like central casting’s idea of a lawyer walked in. Bald head on top, black gorse around the ears. Pinstripe suit, white shirt, patterned red-and-yellow tie. Black briefcase dangling from left hand. Skinny black-framed eyeglasses that reflected the light. Watch on left wrist big enough and shiny enough to be the entire control panel on a Star Trek ship. Looking from Mark to Detective Cohan, apparently unable to sort them out, he said, “Mark Sterling?”

“Ere,” Mark said, and raised a hand.

“Eldron Gold,” the lawyer said. “The Richards firm sent me. Is this police officer arresting you?”

“Not yet,” Detective Cohan said, with a happy smile, as he stood and put away his crossword puzzles.