“She was too boring to get in trouble,” Jamie said.
The early cocktail crowd was beginning to drift in. The demands on Jamie made it harder to talk with her.
“Anything else you can tell me about Mary?” I said. “Anything unusual?”
Down the bar a guy was gesturing to Jamie. He had on a black shirt with the collar worn out over the lapels of his pearl gray suit.
“No,” Jamie said as she started to move down the bar. “She was just a kind of dumb phantom kid, you know? Nothing special.”
That would be Mary.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
I was in my office reading Tank Mcationamara and preparing to think about Mary Toricelli Smith some more when my door opened carefully and a woman poked her head in.
“Mr. Spenser?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She came in quickly and shut the door behind her.
“Remember me?” she said. “Amy Peters? From Pequod Bank?”
“Who could forget you,” I said.
I gestured quite elegantly, I thought, at one of my two client chairs. She sat and crossed her legs, holding her purse in her lap with both hands. I smiled. She smiled. I waited.
“I… I… don’t know quite how to do this,” she said.
“I can tell.”
“It’s… I’ve been fired.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“It was… they said I had no business talking to you the way I did.”
“What would be the business of a PR director?” I said.
She smiled and shrugged. “I don’t even know what I said to you that was so bad,” she said.
“Who exactly is ”they“?”
“Mr. Conroy. He called me into his office and questioned me quite closely about our conversation.”
“And?”
“And when he was through he told me I was fired. The bank, he said, would give me two weeks’ pay. But as of this moment I was through.”
“What was the thrust of his questioning?” I said.
“He wanted to know what we talked about.”
“Specifically,” I said.
“He wanted to know what you asked about Mr. Smith, and what I told you.”
“And why are you telling me?”
She stopped as if she hadn’t thought about that before. I nodded encouragingly.
“I, well, I guess I thought it was important,” she said.
“Un huh?”
“I mean, you are investigating his death.”
“Do you have a theory about what the connection might be?” I said.
“They seemed pretty worried about you.”
“”They“ being Marvin Conroy?”
“Yes.”
“Why do you call him ”they“?”
“I don’t know. I guess…” She paused and thought about my question. “I guess it’s because I think there are people behind him.”
“How so?”
“I think he has allegiances outside the bank,” she said.
“Why do you think that?”
She was sitting very straight in her chair, sitting with her knees together, leaning forward from the waist. The position hiked her short skirt to mid thigh. I admired her legs.
“Well, he came in as a partner all of a sudden,” she said. “This was a family-owned bank for more than a hundred years and all of a sudden here comes this man who’s not a member of the family, and not, um, not of the social class you’d expect. And he wasn’t in the bank much. When he was, he was… I don’t know how to explain it.
