Cassie thought of Edith and nodded. Then a big thing happened in a tiny beat without her deliberating about it at all. She'd met a man she might have liked if she'd known him in high school. His investigation of her felt like a date, so she led with a strength. She'd skipped breakfast and missed lunch, and wanted something to eat with her coffee. There was nothing in the house, so she preheated the oven to four hundred and began to assemble scones. She filled a measuring cup with flour, added salt, sugar, baking powder, then cut butter into it, sprinkling in enough milk to create a small lump of soft dough. She patted the lump out on her granite countertop and kneaded in a handful of currents and some candied orange peel. Then she cut out eight tiny biscuits with a shot glass and frothed the rest of the milk while they were baking.
By the time perfect scones came out of the oven, Cassie had set the table with her own strawberry jam and cappuccino in big cups, and her visitor was speechless with wonder.
"Tell me about gift tax," she said matter-of-factly, as if this kind of hat trick was an everyday occurrence, which it was.
"This is just the most amazing thing I've ever seen," Charlie said, lifting a tiny browned scone to his nose to sniff, as he had the orchid. "You just did that?" He snapped his fingers.
"Well, we needed a grain food group," she explained.
"Wow, a competent woman."
She sipped the coffee. That was not bad, either. "Well, thanks. It's not as great as it looks."
"Yes, it is. It's better than it looks," he murmured.
She snorted. "The picture of perfect domesticity, I mean."
"Oh?" He tilted his head in that way he had.
"My comatose husband has a girlfriend." Cassie took a scone and broke off a tiny piece. "I didn't know he was planning to divorce me until the stroke. When I found out he and this girl had been together for years, I got upset, drove over to her house, and yelled at her, so she's suing me for ten million dollars. You came as a surprise on the same day." She sucked her lip into her mouth. "Actually, I'm a nervous wreck."
"Well, you could have fooled me." Charlie drank some coffee and put the cup down. "This is the best coffee I've ever tasted. The best scones. About you, this says it all. It really does. You have a lot of style."
Her lip trembled. "Thank you."
"And I've seen it all. This is the oldest story in the world. I've lived it myself. What do you want to know about gift tax?"
CHAPTER 32
ON SATURDAYS CHARLIE SCHWAB HAD A SCHEDULE. In the morning he spent three hours working at his office. It was quiet there, and he liked to get out of the house, where Ogden always wanted to do father-son stuff together, like play Scrabble or poker and gamble with spare change. After work he had an hour and a half of real tennis at the indoor courts on Ocean Road with his friend Harvey-also a revenue agent-who was once ranked 143 on the tennis circuit and never got over it.
After tennis, in which the score was always 6-4, 4-6, 6-5, with the two men taking turns at winning, they made the short hop across the street for lunch at Steven's Fish House. The one who lost did the grumbling, and they both had the same lunch year-round. Clam roll, fully loaded. Couple of beers. If the kitchen didn't have clams, they'd have an oyster roll fully loaded. After that, goodbye to Harvey. Charlie did the weekly food shopping for Ogden to reduce the risk of the Rau family giving him things he shouldn't eat. Chickpea fritters, onion kulcha, deep-fried pastries, vegetable tandoori. Everything big enough to choke a horse, not to mention a man who had trouble with applesauce. Then he'd go home with the groceries and play around in the kitchen whipping up some really yummy soft foods.
This Saturday he expected the usual. He'd spent his workweek sniffing around the Sales situation, giving some thought to Mona Whitman and Cassie Sales. At first, he'd thought that since Cassie was the man's wife, she had to be in on it. He figured he could get her to open up easily enough. His plan had been to get down into the cellar and inventory the valuable wines their informant claimed was hidden there. The private cellar was only a small piece of the puzzle. What could Sales have down there, a few hundred cases? But it could serve as the "way in," the discrepancy in documenting that would justify a wider investigation.
Their informant, via a number of anonymous letters on Sales stationery, had revealed that Mitchell Sales personally was taking in a lot of cash off the books. If that was the case, he had to be laundering the money somehow, or else getting it out of the country-maybe into a numbered account in Switzerland or offshore. Maybe both. The wife would certainly know about that.
On Thursday when he was in Newark auditing a dry-cleaning chain-ironically enough, also a company that took in a lot of cash-Charlie had checked out a second Sales warehouse in New Jersey. It had been described in various documents as a depot, just a staging area of about 1,500 square feet. The warehouse at the address listed, however, turned out to be more on the order of 165,000 square feet, almost as large as the Long Island warehouse. Pay dirt indeed. He had been considering the ways to go with it. They could track the truckers, go through the garbage for the paperwork on the deliveries. Check the files in the computers inside there. Lot of things they could do.
But yesterday the picture had changed for him. He'd searched the greenhouse at the Sales home, looking for a safe or a false floor in which Sales could be hiding gems or cash. He'd found only magical orchids-gorgeous, but probably not worth more than a hundred dollars each. During his three-hour talk with Cassie Sales over the coffee and the biscuits she'd made, then over fruit and a tiny glass of very good sherry, she'd filled him in on the wine distribution business as she understood it, and he'd explained gift tax.
Maybe he'd been smitten over the coffee and homemade baked goods, maybe it was the sherry and grapes. But he believed her story about the girlfriend. If Cassie had only just learned about the girlfriend, as she claimed, it didn't seem likely that she was the informant. In any case, he hadn't had the heart to question her about the wine cellar in the basement or the offshore accounts. It seemed pretty clear that whatever he did, this beautiful, classy, and very nice lady stood to lose a great deal from his uncovering her husband's business dealings. So he'd done something unusual, he'd backed off.
Charlie was in a deep brooding state when he stepped out of the district office building in Brooklyn after finishing up his work for the morning. Coming outside he was momentarily blinded by the dazzling mid-June sunlight. Then, just as earlier in the week in similar circumstances, he saw Mona Whitman leaning against her car. It was seventy-eight degrees warm. The sky was robin's egg blue, and there were no clouds floating around up there where heaven was supposed to be. Mona was wearing sunglasses, tight pants, high heels, and a little sweater that didn't hide her magnificent chest.
"Charles Schwab. Hi." She waved and called out to him. "I think I found something that might help you."
"No kidding." He walked over to see what it was.
"Wow, you look different on the weekend," she said admiringly.
He was dressed in the cut-offs and white T-shirt he always wore for tennis. None of that fancy stuff for him. The T-shirt he was wearing had a few holes in the ribbing around the neckline. Mona pointed at the bulging Bloomingdale's shopping bag sitting on the car beside her.