I shrugged and had a Brazil nut that I plucked out from among the remaining peanuts. One Brazil nut wouldn’t hurt anything.
“The bank was a family-owned business, until Marvin Conroy came aboard. He fired the woman for incompetence. And he doesn’t want to talk with me. I know that some people from Soldiers Field Development Limited are interested in what I’m doing and want me to stop doing it. I talked with Smith’s broker and was assaulted shortly thereafter.”
“Assaulted?”
“Yeah. They weren’t very good at it.”
“That’s nice,” Susan said.
“DeRosa, the guy that says Mary Smith wanted him to kill her husband, is represented by Ann Kiley, Bobby Kiley’s daughter.”
“The defense lawyer?”
“Yes. The firm is Kiley and Harbaugh, but it’s really Kiley and Kiley. Father and daughter.”
“That’s sort of charming,” Susan said.
“It is,” I said. “But why is a firm like that representing a stiff like DeRosa?”
“Social conscience?”
“You bet,” I said. “And then we have Mary Smith herself. She still seems to have a relationship of some sort with an old high school boyfriend who is evasive when asked about it.”
“By you.”
“By me.”
“And what did he say?”
“As I recall,” I said, “he told me to ”shove fucking off.“”
“She must have been attracted to him by his silver tongue,” Susan said. “What does Mary say?”
“You’d have to talk with Mary to understand,” I said.
“Why? What’s she like?”
I found another Brazil nut in the dish, and a cashew. I ate both of them. I hadn’t seen the cashew before.
“She’s a living testament to the power of dumb.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning you ask her something and she seems too dumb to answer it. You can’t catch her in contradictions because she doesn’t seem aware of them even after they’re pointed out.”
“Seems kind of smart to me,” Susan said.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “I think she knows she’s dumb and sort of uses it.”
“Maximizing her potential,” Susan said. “Anything else bothering you?”
“Yeah. Nathan Smith. He was unmarried until he married Mary, in his fifties. According to Mary, he was a friend and helper to a number of young men, both prior to and during his marriage to her.”
“If he were gay, would he have hidden it? This is not a closeted age.”
“Old Yankee family. President of the family bank.”
“Still,” Susan said.
“Remember your patient,” I said.
“He was a boy. And he was very troubled.”
“Nathan Smith was once a boy.”
Susan nodded.
“Of course,” she said.
“It’s something I’ve got to look into.”
“Because you think it would have bearing on his death?”
“Suze, I don’t have a goddamned clue what has a bearing on his death. Every time I find a rock I turn it over.”
We sat quiet for a time. She held her partially sipped cosmopolitan in both hands, looking at its pink surface.
“It bothers you that the woman from the bank died.”
“She came to me and told me about getting fired,” I said. “She said she was afraid of Conroy, the new CEO.”
“And you feel you should have protected her?”
I shrugged.
“S.” Susan’s eyes were very big as she looked up at me over the glass. “You’re feeling a little guilty, too.”
