She waited until he stopped chortling. “That idea didn’t originate with me, you know.” Actually, to her knowledge, the only other person who shared the suspicion that one of the vice presidents could be behind the death of Al Ulrich was Father Zachary Tully. And the priest was nowhere near as convinced as she.
“Oh?”
“No. But it got me to thinking ….”
Jack shook his head, condescendingly. Suddenly she was furious. Why in hell did he have to be so damned smug? Well, she’d fix his wagon!
“Yes. I did. I did think a lot. Oh, not about you and me. No, Jack, I thought about you and the bank. That precious bank that you’re all so crazy about. And I started digging, and I asked some questions-” For the first time she seemed to have his undivided attention. Good! Let Mr. Smartypants Knowitall stew in his own smug juice. “Oh, don’t worry; I was very careful; nobody could possibly connect you with any of my questions. But you know, Al has always talked about his work … and believe it or not, I’ve always listened. And I can put two and two together. And guess what, Jack: it came up four!”
He just looked at her, waiting.
“Yes, sweetie, I know what you’ve been doing.” Actually, she didn’t know a thing, but she was so teed off at his supercilious attitude that she plowed on. “You’ve been building yourself one helluva golden parachute, haven’t you? So that if or when you were bounced out of your position-replaced by Al-you’d land softly and sweetly and have a pile for as many rainy days as might come along. And just imagine what would happen if Tom Adams found out-”
Suddenly, his entire demeanor changed. His expression became feral. She’d seen this look before. Animals, especially small animals, when literally cornered, fix their adversary with such a gaze, seeming to say, “Okay, you’ve put me in an inescapable situation. Now it’s you or I-and I’m going to do everything I can to make sure you are not the winner.”
A shiver passed through Barbara’s body. Had her trial balloon touched reality? For the first time she had reason to question this inquisition.
Had she hit paydirt? What if Jack really was playing fast and loose with the bank’s finances? What might he do to silence her-or anyone who might guess at the truth?
With evident resolve, Jack once more pulled a veil over his expression. He was his erstwhile enigmatic self. “Barbara,” he said at length, “that’s a pretty serious charge. But because there’s no truth to it whatever, I know this allegation is your brainchild and yours alone. You’re bluffing-why, I don’t know-but” — he smiled sardonically-” you’d make a rotten poker player, my dear. And” — he leaned toward her-“just in case you’ve a mind to try to make trouble, let me tell you: this cockamamie accusation had better not leave this apartment.”
Barbara stared at him, speechless.
“Besides” — he sat back, relaxed-“there wasn’t the slightest possibility of my being let go. Al had little or no chance of supplanting any of us. And in the unlikely-extremely unlikely-event that it might have happened,
She had, it seemed, struck out again. Both Jack and Martin had been convincing in their innocence of any involvement in Al’s death.
As for bank misconduct, Jack’s mask had slipped-momentarily, but a slip nonetheless. Despite his words, her bluff had hit home: something was highly questionable about his dealings with Adams Bank. Yet she seemed somehow to have missed the target. Was she on the mark with her guess about the facts, but wrong about the motive? No way of knowing.
However, for all practical purposes, she could prove no charge against either Martin or Jack. She shrugged mentally. Two down. Two to go.
But first the little matter of paternity, and a generous support through the distant future for mother and child. She might not be able to pin Jack to the wall as far as his bank dealings were concerned, but he wasn’t going to weasel out of his paternal responsibility. Composing her thoughts and her face, she affected a sort of wry, little-girl sweetness, as if he had defeated her in a tennis match that she had known in advance she would lose because of course he was so much better at everything than she. “Care for more coffee, Jack?” she asked, every inch the gracious loser.
“Please.”
She poured for him. No more for herself. “We have only one more outstanding matter to be taken care of.”
“If this is what I think it is, I’m just surprised it wasn’t the primary, if not the only concern.”
“A matter of paternity, Jack. Al’s gone, so he won’t be kicking up a stink-and he certainly would have. But if everything comes out okay, in about seven or so months I’ll have a baby and you’ll have a son or a daughter. What do you intend to do about it? I don’t think either of us wants to go public with this. We don’t want a mess … at least I certainly don’t.”
She didn’t know what to make of his lively smile. “Well?”
“No. No, my dear, we do not want to go public and get into a mess.”
Why was he making such a production of this?
“I have taken the trouble of photostating the bill for a doctor’s services rendered a little more than three years ago.” He reached across the table and handed her a rectangular piece of paper.
It was an itemized bill for outpatient surgery.
She was flabbergasted. “A vasectomy!”
“That’s what it says. And that’s what it was.”
“I don’t understand.” And she did not. “You had a vasectomy before we ever got together! You were sterile before we-! Why did you bother going along with my insistence on using birth control? Why, for God’s sake, would you bother wearing a condom?”
He held out his cup. “Just one more cup, please, Barbara? One for the road.” The smile became a smirk. For that and his cocky attitude as he defeated her every effort to entangle him in any facet of this affair, she hated him. But she held any external manifestation in check.
She poured another cup of coffee and handed it to him. He sipped it and smiled a bit more genuinely.
“Why?” she repeated.
He tipped his head to one side as if considering how to phrase his response. “Why? No one does anything for one reason alone. Let’s see: why would I go along with your demand that we be super protected: you with spermicide, a diaphragm-maybe an IUD, for all I know; me with a condom; just about everything but rhythm-and, of course, the Pill?
“Well, it was amusing, that’s one. It enabled me to play a trump that you never knew I held-as I just did. That’s two. And it provided protection for me from any venereal disease if you were sexually active with anyone else.
“You see, Barbara, I bought your story that you and Al were not participating in conjugal life. It was just too bizarre not to be true.
“And, as it turns out, your sleeping around was exactly what was going on. That was borne out by your note. You are pregnant. That I believe. The father is not your husband. That I believe.
“But the father is not I. That I know for an indisputable fact.”
Barbara’s head hung. She seemed to be studying the floor. “Vasectomies aren’t always foolproof,” she said in a small voice.
He looked at her almost pityingly. “Mine is, I guarantee you. I have a semen test as part of my regular six- month checkup.” He shook his head. “No, my dear, that dog won’t hunt.”
He stood, and picked up his coat and hat. “I’ll just let myself out. Out of your apartment, and out of your life very probably.”
She didn’t move. She continued to stare at the floor as the door closed.
If she had looked at Jack as he departed, she would have seen that his smug demeanor had been replaced by one of dark determination.
What rotten luck! Her first two candidates hadn’t panned out at all. And all this time she’d thought she was in a win-win situation. She couldn’t lose; none of her candidates could have passed all three tests. But the first two, indeed, had.
The other two she had scheduled for tomorrow. They would not fail her. She had a premonition. Her intuition
