The bank had been started by his forebears in 1874. It was Mauney who should be ensconced within the crown and have his black and white portrait regularly printed in the Wall Street Journal. Mauney loathed Cahoon, and whenever possible, Mauney dropped poison pellets about his boss, spreading malicious gossip hinting at eccentricities, poor judgement, idiocy, and malignant motives for the good in the world Cahoon had done. Mauney requested a doggie bag, as he always did, because he never knew when he might get hungry later in his room at the luxurious Park Hotel, near Southpark Mall.
He paid the seventy-three-dollar-and-seventy-cent bill, leaving two percent less than his usual fifteen-percent tip, which he figured to the penny on a wafer-thin calculator he kept in his wallet. The waitress had been slow bringing his fourth drink, and being busy was no excuse. He returned to the sidewalk out front, on West Trade Street, and the valets scurried, as they always did. Mauney climbed into his rental black Lincoln Continental, and decided he really was not in the mood to return to his hotel just yet.
He briefly thought of his wife and her endless surgeries and other medical hobbies, as he cataloged them. What he spent on her in a year was a shock, and not one stitch of it had improved her, really. She was a manikin who cooked and made the rounds at cocktail parties.
Buried somewhere deep in Mauney's corporate mind were memories of Polly at Sweetbriar, when a carload of Mauney's pals showed up for a dance one Saturday night in May. She was precious in a blue dress, and wanted nothing to do with him.
The spell was cast. He had to have her that moment. Still, Polly was busy, hard to find, and cared not. He started calling twice a day. He showed up on campus, hopelessly smitten. Of course, she knew exactly what she was doing. Polly had been mentored thoroughly at home, at boarding school, and now at this fine women's college. She knew how men were if a girl acknowledged their attentions. Polly knew how to play hard to get. Polly knew that Mauney had a pedigree and portfolio that she had been promised since childhood, because it was her destiny and her entitlement. They were married fourteen months after their first meeting, or exactly two weeks after Polly graduated cum laude, with a degree in English which, according to her proud new husband, would make her unusually skilled in penning invitations and thank-you notes.
Mauney could not pinpoint precisely when his wife's many physical complications began. It seemed she was playing tennis, still peppy and enjoying the good fortune he made possible for her, until after their second child was born. Women. Mauney would never figure them out. He found Fifth Street and began cruising, as he often did when he was deep in thought. He began getting excited as he looked out at the night life and thought about his trip tomorrow afternoon. His wife thought he would be in Charlotte for three days. Cahoon and company believed Mauney was returning to Asheville after breakfast. All were wrong.
While family traveled from the distant airports of Los Angeles and New York, the bereft chief and her sons went through closets and dresser drawers, carrying out the painful task of dividing and disposing of Seth's clothing and other personal effects. Hammer could not look at her late husband's bed, where the nightmare had begun as he got drunk and fantasized about what he could do to really hurt her this time. Well, you did it, Seth. You figured it out. Hammer thought. She folded extra-extra-large shirts, shorts, underwear, socks, and placed them in paper bags for the Salvation Army.
They made no decision about Seth's valuables, such as his four different Rolex watches, the wedding band that had not fit him in more than ten years, the collection of gold railroad watches that had belonged to his grandfather, his Jaguar, not to mention his stocks, and his cash. Hammer cared nothing about any of it, and frankly expected him to zing her one last time in his will. She had never been materialistic and wasn't about to begin now.
"I don't know the details about any of his affairs," she said to her sons, who cared nothing about them, either.
"That figures," said Jude as he removed another suit from a hanger and began folding it.
"You would think he might have discussed his will with you. Mom."
Tart of it is my fault. " She closed a drawer, wondering how she could have endured this activity alone.
"I never asked."
"You shouldn't have to ask," Jude angrily said.
"Part of the whole point of living with someone is you share important things with each other, you know? Like in your case, so you could maybe plan for your future in the event something happened to him? Which was a good possibility with his rotten health."
"I've planned for my own future." Hammer looked around the room, knowing that every molecule within it would have to go.
"I don't do so badly on my own."
Randy was younger and angrier. As far as he was concerned, his father had been selfish and neurotic because he was spoiled and made no effort to think about others beyond what function they might have served in his wasteful, rapacious existence.
Randy, especially, seethed over the way his mother had been treated.
She deserved someone who admired and loved her for all her goodness and courage. He went over and wrapped his arms around her as she folded a Key West shirt she remembered Seth buying on one of their few vacations.
"Don't." She gently pushed her son away, tears filling her eyes.
"Why don't you come stay with us in LA for a while?" he gently said, holding on to her, anyway.
She shook her head, getting back to the business at hand, determined to get every reminder of Seth out of this house as fast as she could, that she might get on with life.
"The best thing for me is to work," she said.
"And there are problems I need to resolve."
"There are always problems. Mom," Jude said.
"We'd love it if you came to New York."
"You know anything about this Phi Beta Kappa key on a chain?" Randy held it up.
"It was inside the Bible in the back of this drawer."
Hammer looked at the necklace as if she had been struck. The key was hers, from Boston University, where she had enjoyed four very stimulating years and graduated near the top of her class, with a double major in criminal justice and history, for she believed that the two were inexorably linked. Hammer had grown up with no special privileges or promise that she would amount to much, since she was a girl amid four brothers in a household with little money and a mother who did not approve of a daughter thinking the dangerous thoughts hers did. Judy Hammer's Phi Beta Kappa key had been a triumph, and she had given it to Seth when they had gotten engaged. He wore it for a long time, until he began to get fat and hateful.
"He told me he lost it," Hammer quietly said as the telephone rang.
West felt terrible about bothering her chief again. West apologized on the cellular phone inside her police car, as she sped downtown. Other units and an ambulance roared to the heart of Five Points, where another man from out of town had been brutally slain.
"Oh Lord," Hammer breathed, shutting her eyes.
"Where?"
"I can pick you up," West said over the line.
"No, no," Hammer said.
"Just tell me where."
"Cedar Street past the stadium," West said as she shot through a yellow light.
"The abandoned buildings around there. Near the welding supply company. You'll see us."
Hammer grabbed her keys from the table by the door. She headed out, not bothering to change out of her gray suit and pearls. Brazil had been driving around, in a funk, when he'd heard the call on the scanner. He got there fast, and now was standing beyond crime-scene tape, restless in jeans and T-shirt, frustrated because no one would let him in. Cops were treating him as if he were a reporter no different than others out foraging, and he didn't understand it.