Clinton Grainger stared at the darkening night, then turned to me with his blank eyes and bulbous nose. Then he shook his head. “He doesn’t like partners.” He shrugged; he was giving up, too. “Good night, Mr. Boyer.”
I called Fred to report, and he was not impressed by my actions. “We’ll just have to wait for his response.”
“I guess that will be soon?”
“Yes, and unmistakable.”
It wasn’t late when I got home, and Katie met me in the hall.
“I don’t like this,” I said.
“What happened? How did everything go?”
“Terrible. I nearly died.”
“What?” She stepped back and looked me over for blood. “What happened?”
“I met with my financial adviser to find out how filthy rich I am and then I had a board meeting to hear how much more filthy rich I’m going to be and then I had dinner with the most powerful man in the state government to show off my filthy riches.”
“Were you in an accident? What did you mean about dying?”
“What I said. Jason is just about dead. He barely survived, right at the end.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Forget the melodrama. You’re doing what you need to be doing.” Then she smiled. “And you still look like Jason.”
“The big bad wolf has eaten granny, and now he’s wearing her clothes.”
“You talk like Jason.”
“That would be harder to fake.”
“Now tell me what happened. What did George Elias say?”
I shrugged. “Let me sit down.” I led the way to the study and called for Rosita to bring me some milk and a sandwich. I don’t mind lying, but I’d told a real whopper to Grainger. I was plenty hungry.
I took my time. When I was done, and Katie had been very patient, I took my new checkbook and wrote her a check for a million dollars.
“Don’t spend it all in one place.”
Her mouth dropped open when I handed it to her. “What is this for?”
“You need me to tell you? Just take it. Celebrate a little. Have a party. Buy a new dress.”
“But…”
“That’s nothing, Katie. You want to know what I’m worth now? Guess.”
“I can’t.”
“Yeah, I bet you couldn’t. Remember Eric said fifty million?” I shook my head. “Wrong. Way wrong.” I was being mean, but I couldn’t help it. I was feeling a lot of pain from the day, and I wanted to share it.
“That seemed like a lot.”
“It is a lot. Way too much for one person. That’s why the truth hurts even more.” I looked her in the eye. “A billion dollars.”
“Jason!”
“Yeah. Who’d have thought? He acted rich, but not that rich.”
It took her a few seconds to get her breath back. “A billion dollars?”
“That’s right. That’s not an M, it’s a B. You have hit the jackpot, cupcake. Call your momma and tell her she was wrong. No, I think I’ll call the little rapscallion myself.”
“It’s all ours?”
“To the last brass farthing. If you invested a billion dollars in the bank, do you know what the interest would be? Two hundred thousand. Per day. You could even have hard feelings against the old man for being stingy, with the paltry thirty grand a month he was giving us.”
“What are we going to do?”
“If we keep on a budget and don’t spend too much, we’ll manage somehow. A billion dollars isn’t what it used to be, you know.”
She took a deep breath and we both calmed down. “That’s not what I meant. Oh, never mind. Are you all right?”
I wasn’t. A billion dollars weighs a lot, and right then I was feeling it all. “I want to get to bed.”
“Come this way.” Mama Katie took command.
6
Tuesday morning I went running. I do it for exercise and I don’t push myself, but that morning I set a world record in the four mile Run Away From Your Problems event. Katie was still asleep when I left, and was just coming down to breakfast by the time I came back in.
“That was fast.”
“Paparazzi. You have to sprint to keep ahead of them.”
“Really?”
“No.”
She was waiting when I came back down from my shower, and we ate together. We always eat breakfast looking out over the garden.
“What are you doing today?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I want to meet more of the people who worked for Melvin. And I want to catch Nathan Kern before he goes to Africa tomorrow, to talk about the foundation. That’ll be dinner out again tonight.”
“Could we have him over here?”
Our house could use the blessing of his presence. “Yeah. I’ll have Pamela set it up. It’ll be friendlier, in case he has hard feelings about not getting Melvin’s wad for the foundation.”
I finished breakfast, and Katie was still there watching me. “Did you see Angela yesterday?”
“We had lunch downtown,” she said. “It was very nice.”
“Does she know what she’s doing with her life?”
“No.”
“She has no money worries.”
“She’s very lonely. And she’s afraid to make friends.”
“She should be. She’s a rich, single, lonely sitting duck.” Besides, she didn’t know how to make a friend. She never had.
“I told her we’d take care of her.”
“I guess we have to.”
“She had a husband. Now she’s by herself, and she never has been before.”
A little kitten in the deep woods. I’d never get the adoration from Katie that Melvin did from Angela, and I’d hate it anyway. Maybe when I was older. Maybe for my second wife I’d pick an Angela.
“We’ll take care of her,” I said. “We’ll assign you to watch her, and I’ll keep Eric under control.” Who needs kids? “Maybe we could set her up with Nathan.”
Katie’s eyes lit up. “What an idea, Jason. I’m going to think about it.”
“Katie, I was joking.”
“But still…”
“And they could adopt Eric. They could be the parents he’s always wanted.”
“Now, that’s being silly. When are you seeing Eric again?”
“I’ll call him today.”
I didn’t. It was a long day and I was being very conscientious regarding my many responsibilities, which involved mainly sitting upstairs in my little office and talking on the phone to people whose names were on lists that Fred Spellman and George Elias had given to me.
I left the house to meet with Stan Morton of the newspaper and television empire. We talked about his
