the door jam. I tried not to look at her chest.
“Your interest in Mr. Lombard?”
“I’m trying to work out some tricky ownership issues on a piece of property up in North Sea. Your father’s name was all over the documents, so I thought maybe he could help clear it up.”
“Real-estate matter.”
“That’s pretty much what it is, yeah.”
She shrugged and walked away from the door. I took that as an invitation and followed her in. Time inside the house was stalled in midcentury. Glossy white trim paint covered lumpy woodwork. The wallpaper was covered with baronial garden parties and foxhunts. Pipe tobacco and unwashed wool mingled with kitchen grease and sachet.
Arnold was sitting in the living room in an overstuffed easy chair. His hands gripped the armrests like he was preparing for takeoff. He was much older than I thought he’d be, well over ninety. His clothes were clean, but ancient and threadbare. There were pipes arrayed around a freestanding ashtray, but no ashes. A dusting of white hair covered his long, bone-hard skull. His daughter had come by the nose honestly.
“Daddy?”
He looked up at her.
“This gentleman has a real-estate matter to discuss.”
He frowned with the effort to understand.
“A real-estate matter,” she repeated. He looked over at me.
“Then what’s he doing here?”
“I thought maybe you could answer some questions for me about a property up in North Sea.”
“I’m retired.”
“This was a property you handled back in the seventies.”
He looked down and shook his head.
“I don’t know if I can remember all that.”
His daughter massaged his shoulder and smiled sweetly.
“Oh, sure you can Daddy. You know about every piece of property on the East End.”
He raised his thin eyebrows in a type of smile.
“That’s true. Your mother says I’m nothing but a head full of topographicals.”
“That’s what she always said,” said his daughter, correcting the tense.
She swung around and dropped into a love seat and patted the space next to her. I sat down and pulled out the file from the Town records. She drew her legs up so the soft soles of the dancing slippers applied a slight pressure to my right thigh.
I handed him a copy of the rental agreement his firm had drawn up for Bay Side Holdings. He took it with one hand and, with some difficulty, dug his glasses out from under his wool cardigan. His daughter let him struggle on his own. Patience hung in the air.
When the tiny silver wire rims were finally perched on that mighty outcropping it made him look like a sorcerer in a Disney movie.
“Oh yes, well, we did a lot of these. Certainly.”
I let him read for a while.
“Hm, hm,” he said, and handed it back to me.
“Yes, we managed all the Bay Side leaseholds. Had the exclusive.”
He sat back, satisfied.
His daughter had her chin cupped in her hand with an index finger braced against her nose. She closed her eyes, shook her head and smiled that beatific smile.
“That’s fine, Daddy, but I think he’s looking for a little more detail,” she said.
Arnold thought about it. He leaned back in his chair and looked up at the ceiling.
“Well, as I recall, that outfit owned a fair number of these parcels up there in North Sea, some of which had houses built on them. They were concerned they’d be vandalized if left unoccupied. We were charged with keeping them filled with the best possible people—considering the location, mind you, which was not ideal.”
Class paranoia washed over me.
“That outfit was Bay Side Holdings.”
“Well, certainly, Bay Side were the people who engaged the services of the firm. However, they were the agents for the actual owners. This was made clear to me from the start. I don’t recall their names, precisely, but I believe we could discover that in our files.” He looked over at his daughter for confirmation.
“I’m sure we could dig something out, Daddy.”
He swung his gaze back to me as something else occurred to him.
“I do have a theory about Bay Side, however.”
“Do you.”
“Yes. But,” he pointed at me with a bent knuckle the way Regina always did, “it would likely be a sensitive matter. The firm’s standing depends on discretion.”
His daughter looked over at me. I kept my eyes on Arnold.
“You shouldn’t tell me anything that would betray a confidence, Mr. Lombard.”
“I don’t believe in that.”
“I can’t promise I won’t use information you give me in dealing with this—it’s an estate settlement, by the way—but I’ll keep your name out of it.”
“You’re an attorney?” his daughter asked.
“Estate administrator.”
I didn’t think Arnold understood the distinction, but I was more concerned about his daughter. I wanted her to like me.
“Well,” he looked up at the ceiling again as if his thoughts were written out up there, “I always felt that Bay Side was a captive. You’re familiar with the term?”
“You mean the owner of the property was their only client. They were owned by the owners.”
“Yes, something like that. I’m not suggesting there was any impropriety, just that Bay Side was a dummy. You know, a front. Perfectly legal, of course. Commercial interests often structure real-estate management as a separate enterprise—a subsidiary.”
“Daddy started in corporate real estate. In the city,” she said, looking at him.
“What gave you this idea, if you don’t mind me asking.”
“Well, I’ve done quite a bit of this sort of thing, sir. You get to know how things are. Patterns and rhythms. A feeling, really. Ask Rosaline.”
She puffed out a little breath.
“He thinks I’m psychic because I predict the weather. Hasn’t caught on to the Weather Channel yet.”
Humor lit his eyes to spite his deadpan face.
“I know perfectly well how to locate the Weather Channel. I only mean that we often discuss the mysteries of intuition.”
She shrugged at me again. I think she did a lot of shrugging.
“I’m a big supporter of intuition myself, folks,” I said. “No need to explain further.”
“Would you like some tea? Caffeinated or Red Zinger,” she said, now that we’d bumped the conversation up a notch.
“Sure. A little Zinger’d be good.”
“Daddy?”
He made an ambiguous gesture with his mottled hands. She seemed to know what it meant.
“I’ll help,” I said, and followed her into the kitchen.
All the appliances were stainless steel Hotpoints from the mid-fifties. The linoleum on the counter was covered with colorful little boomerangs. We had the same thing in our house when I was growing up. The association was oddly appealing.
“Are there files?” I asked her.
She looked surprised.
“Why of course. Why wouldn’t there be?”
