“Is he your sole trustee?”
“That’s right.”
“And he gives you two hundred dollars a week?”
“Actually I get a check once a month. Sometimes it’s eight hundred, sometimes it’s a thousand, depending on how the weeks fall. It all adds up to ten thousand, four hundred a year.”
“What about inflation?”
Sheila made a face. “What about it? That’s with inflation. I started at fifty a week. It’s up to two hundred.”
“Is the amount a provision of the trust?”
“Yes. Carefully worked out by Grandpa to keep me poor for as long as possible.”
“And your uncle can’t increase that amount.”
She hesitated. “No.”
“You hesitated.”
“Did I? The answer is no, he can’t.”
“But he can give you money at his discretion?”
“In an emergency, yes.”
“And blackmail would be considered an emergency.”
Sheila was getting annoyed. This was not going the way she had hoped. “Look, let’s get something straight. If someone were blackmailing me, the threat would be that if I didn’t pay them, they would tell my uncle. Can you really see me going to my uncle to get money to pay to a blackmailer to keep him from telling my uncle something?”
Farron smiled. “No. Which brings me to the second part of my question. What would this man tell your uncle? What is it you have to hide?”
Sheila looked at him with wide-eyed innocence. “Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing that I’d pay a dime for, even if I had it.”
“Publish and be damned, eh?” Farron nodded. “Quite proper attitude.”
Farron had had enough. He got up to indicate the interview was over.
“Well, Miss Benton, we’ll do what we can.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“If you get any more calls or letters, get in touch with us immediately.”
Sheila stood up. “You sound as if you’re washing your hands of the whole thing.”
Lieutenant Farron came around the desk. He smiled at her, but he also took her arm and guided her to the door.
“Well, Miss Benton,” he said. “You must admit it sounds rather unpromising. You have no money to pay blackmail. You’ve done nothing to be blackmailed about. And so far, no one’s made any demands on you.”
“Some people want other things besides money,” Sheila protested.
“That they do, Miss Benton. That they do.”
Farron opened the door. She gave him a look, then stalked out of the office.
Farron closed the door, went back, and sat at his desk.
“Well,” Stams said. “What do you think?”
Lieutenant Farron thought Sergeant Stams had successfully passed the buck. But he wasn’t going to acknowledge that to him.
Farron shrugged. “Could be nothing. Practical joke. Could be something else. What I don’t like is the fact the phone call came as soon as she got home. It could mean our man’s watching the house.”
Stams nodded. “So what do we do?”
Lieutenant Farron knew that sarcasm would be lost on Sergeant Stams, but he couldn’t help himself.
“What do we do?” he said. “We put three bodyguards on her at all times, assign five squad cars to the area, and tap her phone.”
He looked up to see Sergeant Stams looking at him, impassive as always.
“What do you think we do?” Farron said. He snorted and handed him the letter. “File it.”
3
Sheila Benton spent a restless night.
Johnny called around seven o’clock to tell her he’d arrived safely and everything was going fine. Sheila would have loved to have told him all about what was happening, but she didn’t have the heart. He had his wife’s attorneys to deal with, and he didn’t need the added distraction. Besides, he’d kidded her on the way to the airport that she wouldn’t be able to get along for two days without him, that she’d be calling him up for advice. Well, she’d handled this herself, hadn’t she? She’d reported it to the police. She’d done everything she could do. And what the hell could he do, a million miles away?
And the other thing was, Johnny was never serious. He treated everything as a joke. He wouldn’t take this seriously. He’d just kid her about it
That started Sheila off on a bad train of thought. Johnny was never serious. How could she be sure he was serious about her? Nonsense. She knew he loved her. Didn’t he? Wasn’t he in Reno divorcing his wife so he’d be free to be with her? So what if he was never serious. She liked the way he kidded around. That was part of what had attracted her to him in the first place. So what was she worrying about?
It was a bad night. A night without Johnny. A night without coke. Jesus, she hadn’t thought it was going to be this hard. By eleven o’clock she was climbing the walls. She had ransacked the refrigerator and the kitchen shelves, and found damn little. Some orange juice. Some Wheaties. Some stale crackers. What she found, she ate, but it wasn’t nearly enough. She wanted something exciting, like pizza. But she couldn’t eat a whole pizza, and no one would deliver a slice. And she wasn’t that keen about walking out to Broadway, not alone, not at night, and not now. But she really wanted something.
What she wanted, of course, was coke. She didn’t really want to admit that, but it was true. And when she finally did admit it, when she finally said to herself, “Jesus, I need a hit of coke,” she rationalized. It would have been all right, she told herself, if it hadn’t been for the letter. That was what was throwing her. If it hadn’t been for that, she wouldn’t have needed the coke. She wouldn’t have felt this anxious and desperate. She could give up the coke easy enough, that wasn’t the problem. But not now. Not with Johnny gone and this thing happening to her. This scary thing that she didn’t understand. There was plenty of time to stop taking coke when everything was all right. That was the time to do it. Not in the middle of a crisis. Not with so much else on her mind.
By one in the morning she had convinced herself that there was nothing wrong with buying coke at this particular juncture in her life, and, considering how things stood, she should simply go ahead and do so.
With this conviction, she was finally able to fall asleep.
She awoke the next morning at nine o’clock. She got up, showered and dressed, folded up the bed and set out to accomplish her purpose.
On her way out, she checked the mailbox. The mail hadn’t come yet, and she was glad. She wasn’t up to another letter, if one happened to be in it.
Sheila walked out to Broadway and hailed a cab. Aside from cocaine, taxis were her one extravagance. Sheila couldn’t stand public transportation. It was so filthy in the subway. And so inconvenient, particularly getting from one side of town to the other. You had to take the subway to Times Square, shuttle, and then take a third train where you wanted to go, which was usually blocks from a subway stop anyway. So Sheila splurged a lot on cabs.
The cab took her through Central Park at Eighty-sixth Street, down Fifth Avenue and across to the address she had given on Park Avenue.
Sheila dug in her purse and discovered she had twenty-one dollars. She gave the driver a twenty and a smile. He grumbled over the twenty, which Sheila felt was uncalled for. After all, the meter had been five-seventy. She’d been about to tell him to keep seven bucks, but when he bitched, she made it six-fifty.
