“What happened?”
I retrieved the photograph. “We don’t know. We’re trying to look into every corner of his past to find out.”
He shook his head and stood up, rubbing his hands across his stomach. He suddenly stabbed a button on his intercom. “Ginny, get me a glass of water.”
He stood with his back to me, looking out the window. Ginny came in, nervously glancing at both of us, and placed a glass on the desk. “Will that be all, Mr. Clyde?”
“Yes, thank you.” He waited until she’d left before turning around. He drained the glass, wiped his mouth with a handkerchief from his back pocket, and took a deep breath. I was watching a process of reconstruction so determined, it was like seeing a house rebuild itself brick by brick. He even seemed to reinflate slightly inside his clothes.
When he finally regained his seat, he was almost as I’d first seen him, albeit minutely frayed. “How may I help you?”
It had been an impressive full circle, a roller-coaster ride from utter control, out over an emotional abyss, and back again. “First, an odd question: What was he wearing when you last saw him?”
Clyde’s eyebrows rose slightly. He paused to remember. “Pale tan suit, white shirt, and some light-patterned tie.”
So he’d gone home to change before getting himself killed. Not only had we found him in different, more casual clothes, but I also remembered the suit hanging in the laundry room, presumably for some touching up or ironing. Also, since we had found no automatic timer at the house, it reinforced the theory that the air-conditioning had been turned on in the house by Jardine in expectation of his own return that night.
“When did you first meet Jardine?”
“About a year and a half ago, Tucker Wentworth introduced us.”
Tucker Wentworth was the senior partner of Morris, McGill, Jardine’s prior employer for five years. “Why did he do that?”
That brought a faint, humorless smile to Clyde’s lips. “Because he knew I was becoming bored. I come from Boston, Mr. Gunther, where for my entire professional life I was an investment broker. My wife and I moved up here when I retired, I half believing in her notions of a bucolic life of gardening, reading, and long summer strolls. But within a few months I was about ready to murder her and lay waste to the countryside. The sight of flowers almost made me ill. I needed something to stimulate my mind. Tucker seemed to think Charlie might be the answer.”
“With this business?” I waved my hand around the room.
“Yes. It’s not much, but it did the trick. My background was in analysis; Charlie had a propensity for sales, which I loathe. Tucker suggested we could make a workable odd couple-two men steering a canoe straight by paddling on opposite sides of the boat. That was his image, incidentally. Canoeing is quite a pastime with him.”
By now, all signs of shock had seemingly vanished from Clyde’s countenance. He even interrupted himself to offer me coffee. I turned him down. “What did you know about Charlie Jardine?”
“At first? Nothing. In fact, on first meeting him, I thought Tucker had lost his mind. Charlie’s style and mine are… were pretty far apart. But there was no dishonesty there; we openly discussed how we could and could not work together. Perhaps it was that immediate frankness that appealed to me. There were never any bones made about how I disliked what Charlie did-you know, selling the product-or how he thought the nuts and bolts were ‘a drag,’ to use his phrase.”
“So you hit it off, despite your differences?”
Again the humorless smile. “You make it sound like a blind date. No, it was a gradual process, stimulated by both Tucker’s prodding and my wife’s insistence that I start a garden.”
“But Charlie was a pretty genial guy?”
He tapped his chin with the tips of his fingers. “In an artificial sort of way. He reminded me of a good many of the young sharks I saw in the city. Let’s say that while the source of our mutual interest was shared, our motivations were quite different.”
It seemed the farther we got from the shock of Charlie’s death, the cooler Clyde’s demeanor became. I also was struck that he wasn’t bending over backwards to burnish Charlie’s memory, as one typically does with the dearly departed.
“Meaning you both liked investments, but while he was in it for the money, you just wanted to stay out of your wife’s garden?”
This time he actually chuckled. “That’s certainly accurate, although I like making money, too.”
“What were his qualifications?”
Clyde’s eyebrows shot up. “Ah, yes. Well, that was the rub, as I saw it, when Tucker first approached me. Charlie didn’t really have any experience. A local high school graduate, an undistinguished string of short-lived, low-paying jobs-not very promising. But that was on paper. In person, Charlie could be quite persuasive, and Tucker had taught him well.”
“Tucker knows a lot about stocks?”
Clyde gave me a quizzical look, one usually reserved for people fresh off the fruit truck. “You could say that.”
“I’m afraid someone in my position wouldn’t know much about that.”
“Of course. Well, Tucker Wentworth is extremely qualified. His background encompasses not only corporate law but investment banking as well, a career he pursued prior to moving here twenty years ago. Charlie couldn’t have found a better tutor in the entire southern half of the state.”
“So it was really Wentworth’s recommendation that won you over.”
Clyde became abruptly guarded. “Among other things.”
“Like what? Did he help fund ABC?”
“I’m not sure that we’re not going off on an irrelevant tangent here.” The ponderous double negative made me smile. “Meaning that’s none of my business.”
Clyde looked uncomfortable. “I don’t wish to be uncooperative, but I do have certain confidentialities I must maintain. I’m sure these matters have nothing to do with Charlie’s death.”
I couldn’t have disagreed more, but I wasn’t about to admit it. Until I had a subpoena in my hand allowing me to grab all of Jardine’s papers, I wasn’t going to display the slightest interest in them. “You’re probably right. Somebody did kill him, though. Was there anything about his personal life that might have led to that?”
Clyde shrugged and made a face. “Ours was a business relationship, based on mutual advantage. Tucker Wentworth may have known him well; I did not. I don’t even know where he lives… or lived.”
“You never saw one another outside the office?”
“Well, yes, I’d see him on occasion, maybe to meet a prospective client at a bar, or maybe even in the street on a Saturday or something. It’s a small town, after all, but we didn’t socialize.”
“You didn’t know any of his friends?”
“Only Tucker.”
“Did he talk about himself much? His family, background, likes, dislikes, ambitions, what have you?”
The other man sighed and glanced at his watch, a gesture carefully designed to catch my eye. “He may have tried at first, but I wasn’t interested. My vested interest was in his ability to bring in the accounts, not in his past history and pipe dreams.”
“And he was bringing in the accounts.”
“Yes. Considering that starting a business of this nature can be slow, he did remarkably well. He could win people’s confidence quickly, like any good salesman.”
Dismissive disclaimers like that one had littered this discussion like falling leaves. Arthur Clyde was an old-time aristocratic snob, and I began thinking Charlie had been well served by not sharing his thoughts with him. On the other hand, maybe there was more to it than just snobbism. “You didn’t like Charlie much, did you?”
Of the options available to him, Clyde chose the least appropriate. He gave a false smile and a good-old-boy wave of the hand. “Charlie was a charming person; people instinctively warmed to him.”