She sighed. “I have enough faith in you, Victor, that if you ever got any of this you’d hate it all too much to keep it. Rita told me you were here. I came over because I thought I could help you prepare for Ruffing tomorrow.”
“That’s not what I’m working on. It’s this Valley Hunt Estates prospectus.”
“What about Ruffing?” she asked.
“I have my instructions, and my instructions are to do nothing. How can I justify billing for preparing to do nothing?”
She sat down across from me and sighed again. I was beginning to fear her sighs. She looked around. “Is this place bugged?”
I shrugged. “Probably.”
“Well, screw it,” she said. “Victor, if Prescott is going to point the finger of blame on Chester he’s going to do it tomorrow.”
“He won’t,” I said. “He told me he was going to get Chet off.”
“Like his old boss Nixon said he wasn’t a crook. You should be preparing just in case. Prescott’s whole defense is based on the legality of asking for political money, right? If he tries to distinguish Concannon’s meetings with Ruffing from the phone conversations between Ruffing and Moore, Chester could be in serious trouble. Prescott could claim that what Moore was doing was perfectly legal but that Concannon extended it to the illegal.”
“Concannon was Moore’s top aide. No one would believe that.”
“Remember about the missing money? A quarter of a million that never ended up at CUP? Money like that can erode anyone’s loyalty and don’t think the jury won’t believe it. If Prescott can pin the missing money on Concannon, then Chester is going to take the fall for his boss.”
I took a sip from my Coke. It was in a tall glass, filled with ice cubes I had lifted with pewter tongs from the ice bucket sitting on the marble credenza. “There is no missing money,” I said. “Ruffing’s lying about the numbers to get a bigger tax deduction.”
“Who told you that?” asked Beth.
“Prescott.”
“So it must be true.”
“You know what I think,” I said, suddenly angry. “I think you’re jealous. I think you’re worried that I might just make the big time here and leave you behind, that I might pull a Guthrie. And frankly, it pisses me off that you would think that of me.”
She stared at me for a long moment. I thought I might have seen something terribly sad in her face but then was sure I hadn’t because she was too tough to let me see anything she didn’t want me to see. “What I think of you, Victor, is that you’re drunk on this marble conference table and these fine prints of Old Philadelphia and these free Cokes. And that when you sober up, you’re going to be very sorry for all that you did while under the influence.”
She stood and stared down at me. “Morris wants you to call him,” she said coldly before she left, stranding me with the embossed pens and piles of yellow pads and antique prints. I took another sip of soda.
I turned back to the Valley Hunt Estates papers and read again the list of limited partners who had already agreed to buy into the deal. There was an entry that puzzled me, a partnership purchased by one set of initials for the benefit of another. I was still looking it over, trying to figure it all out, when Jack and Simon Bishop came into the room.
“How’s it all looking, Victor?” asked Simon.
“Great,” I said. “There’s only one thing that troubles me.”
“I don’t fancy the numbers in the five-year pro forma, either,” said Jack, holding in his hand the financial projection prepared for the prospectus. “The numbers are too high.”
“It’s not that,” I said. “The numbers look fine.”
“They look smashing to me,” said Simon. “We’ll sell out within a week.”
“And be sued within a year if things don’t work out,” said Jack.
“They’ll work out, Jack,” said Simon. “They always do. But let’s deal with it later. Right now we’re off to dinner. You coming, Victor?”
I looked at them, their round faces as open to me as an invitation, and whatever concerns I might have had disappeared in the warmth of their generosity. “Sure,” I said. “Dinner sounds great.” I followed them into the elevator for the ride to the parking garage and their Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow.
They took me to a fine French restaurant, a small place in a fancy suburb. It was a long drive but Simon told me it would be worth it and it was. The place was full, a mob of swells waiting at the bar, but the man at the door knew the Bishops and led us right to an empty table by a window. They were actually a jolly pair, these Bishops. I had first thought them to be very stiff and very formal, but that was just their surface manner. Underneath they were great fun, full of rollicking appetites and a taste for fine wines. Halfway into our second bottle I excused myself to make a call.
“Victor, is that you, Victor?”
“Yes, Morris. It’s me.”
“You have a cold or something, Victor? You don’t sound yourself.”
“I’m just a little tired, but I wanted to return your call.”
“You must take care of yourself, Victor. That’s number one. What I do when I’m oysgamitched from all the work, I pick up a bottle of Manischewitz that’s good and thick like a medicine, I lie in bed, turn on the news, drink the wine, fall asleep to Peter Jennings, and when I wake up I’m the old Morris. You should try it.”
“What about chicken soup?”
“Forget what they tell you. Chicken soup in bed it creates such a mess, all that splashing. News I have for you, Victor. Mine son, the computer genius, he has a phone right in his computer and he pulls out a register of marinas and starts looking for our man.”
“Any luck?”
“Calm your shpilkehs and let me tell you. So first he looks under the thief’s name. Stocker. Plugs it in, the search takes an hour, more, the cost of the call is so high I don’t want to say it over the phone.”
“We’ll cover it.”
“Of course. I’m in this business to lose money to AT &T? So word finally comes back, no Stocker. So I think that our friend the accountant might not have sold his boat so fast so we looked up The Debit, and sure enough we get the listings of five boats called The Debit. Five accountants with the same idea, a conspiracy of accountants. So we check them all and, what do you know, there is only one thirty-foot sloop. I still couldn’t tell you what a sloop is, but mine son, he says he knows, and The Debit anchored in a marina just south of St. Augustine, Florida, is a thirty-foot sloop. Owned by a man named Cane. So I happen to know that cane in German is stock.”
“You happen to know?”
“I just happen to know, so I think maybe it’s the same man. So I call the marina and they get hold of our Mr. Cane.”
“And it’s him?”
“Accht, let me finish.”
“Morris, you’re a genius.”
“Victor, so you’ve finally caught on. Yes, with all modesty, I confess that I am. But no, Mr. Cane was not Mr. Stocker. He’s Mr. Cane, Nathan Cane, his father was a Cantowitz. He sells real estate and he sold a big house or something so he says he splurges and buys this boat, The Debit.”
“From who?”
“Funny, that’s exactly what I asked. He says he bought it from a Mr. Radbourn, a little pisher, he tells me. All the papers were in order. So I ask him who Radbourn got it from and he looks on the bill of sale and it turns out Mr. Stocker sold it to Mr. Radbourn, and if you ask me, from the description, Mr. Stocker and Mr. Radbourn are one in the same. He transferred it to himself to make it harder to find him.”
“So what we have now, Morris, is the boat but no Stocker.”
“Exactly right. You’re very quick there, Victor.”