The letter was signed “Jim.”
“Well, he’s right about one thing,” Felicity said, standing and picking up the dossier. “It’s going to be copied into our files.” She went back into the office and closed the door behind her.
41
They packed a lunch, then walked down Dick Stone’s dock to where two boats awaited them: a Concordia and a Hinckley picnic boat. “Do you sail?” Stone asked.
“A little as a child, but that’s all,” she replied.
“Then we’ll take the picnic boat,” he said, stepping aboard and helping her to follow. He put their lunch in the galley, got the engine started, and Felicity cast them off. They motored slowly past the little Tarrantine Yacht Club and its dock and moorings, then Stone pressed the throttle forward and, with the warm sun on their backs, they ran across the open water of Penobscot Bay to a little cove called Pulpit Harbor, where Stone slowed the thirty-six-foot runabout and, finally, dropped anchor in the sheltered waters. Two other small sailing yachts also were anchored there, but there was room for everyone with privacy to spare.
Felicity went below for a few minutes, then brought up a tray with their sandwiches and soup while Stone opened a bottle of California chardonnay from the little fridge.
“Well,” Stone said, when they were munching away, “did the receipt of Hackett’s army service record do anything to convince you he is who he says he is?”
“Certainly not,” she replied, forking a piece of lobster into her mouth.
“Why don’t you get in touch with his old colonel and check out the story about how he got the file?”
“It’s being done as we speak,” she replied.
“So, if a retired colonel, living in a cottage somewhere in Sussex or Cornwall, declines to admit that he had too much wine at lunch one day and gave one of his old soldiers his own dossier that was about to be stored forever, Hackett is Whitestone?”
“Not necessarily. But if the story doesn’t check out, he may not be Hackett, and that’s a start.”
“God, I’m glad you’re not checking into my background,” he said, laughing.
“What makes you think I haven’t?” she asked coyly.
“You didn’t; you wouldn’t.”
“Let’s see: son of a West Massachusetts family who did well in the textile business in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; father disowned because he had Communist tendencies and chose to follow a career in carpentry and cabinetmaking instead of an education at Yale; mother disowned because she married your father. They moved to Greenwich Village, where your father found work as a handyman, then gradually built a business making cabinets and designing furniture; your mother became a painter of some renown, whose work is sought today in the art market. How’m I doing?”
“Couldn’t find anything juicier than that?”
“Not until you left the police, passed the bar exam and went to work for Woodman and Weld. It got a lot more interesting after that. My God, the women!”
Stone reddened. “You’re a prying woman.”
“I’d be a fool not to be, with a staff of researchers and a curious nature,” she said blithely.
“Do you pry so deeply into the backgrounds of all the men you meet?”
“All the ones I sleep with,” she said, “before I sleep with them.”
“And have you turned up any cads?”
“One cashiered army officer who embezzled his regiment’s funds,” she said. “One self-styled entrepreneur who turned out to be a bookmaker, haunting the tracks every day, and one murderer.”
“Tell me about the murderer,” Stone said.
“I had been seeing him for about a year,” she said. “I had just turned thirty and had been promoted to a position in my service that gave me access to a great deal of information. There was talk of marriage. He inherited quite a lot of money and a fine country property from his elder brother, who had died in a farming accident, and he proposed. I vetted him and found that he had been a suspect in the death of an elderly aunt in Scotland, and I brought that to the attention of the police. A few days later two detectives arrived at a restaurant where we were dining and took him away, charging him with his brother’s murder. It was revealed at the trial that he had driven a tractor over the poor fellow and then harrowed him. Tried to make it look like he’d fallen off the machine and under the harrow.”
“And you turned him in?”
“Most certainly,” she replied. “I am an upstanding subject of Her Majesty and an upholder of the law. If he’d been acquitted,” she added, “I’d have married him. As it was, he got life.”
Stone’s cell phone buzzed at his belt. He looked at it and saw Dino was calling. “Excuse me,” he said, and answered it.
“Hello, Dino.”
“Where the hell are you?” Dino asked.
“It’s a secret.”
“I can find out, you know; I’m a detective.”
“Far, far away,” Stone said.
“Well, you’d better get your ass back here,” Dino replied.
“Why?”
“Because your esteemed client, Mr. Herbert Fisher, has been arrested for the murder of his girlfriend, one Sheila Seidman. My guys say he tossed her off his penthouse; she made a mess on Park Avenue.”
“I don’t believe it,” Stone said.
“I don’t know why not,” Dino replied. “If she’d been my girlfriend I’d have offed her a long time ago. Anyway, Herbie’s back in the tank, and he won’t talk to anybody but you. What time will you be here?”
“I’m in Maine, Dino; it’ll have to be tomorrow.”
“Stay another week, for all I care. I just wanted to give you the message.”
“Tell Herbie tomorrow afternoon,” Stone said.
“Okey dokey,” Dino replied. “Felicity with you?”
“That information is classified,” Stone said.
“That means she’s with you. It wouldn’t be classified, if she weren’t.”
“You’re too smart for me, Dino.”
“I always was,” Dino replied and then hung up.
Stone put the phone back in its holster.
“So what difficulty has Mr. Fisher got himself into now?” Felicity asked.
“Apparently, Herbie’s girlfriend, an unbearable woman named Sheila, a prostitute by trade, has taken a dive from the terrace of his new penthouse, and the squad at the Nineteenth like Herbie for it. I have to go back tomorrow morning and deal with the situation, Herbie having paid me a large retainer to look after him.”
“You think he did it?” Felicity asked.
“Let me put it this way,” Stone said. “Today is going to be either the worst day or the best day of his life.”
42
The following morning Stone was loading their luggage into the 1938 Ford when Mary called to him from the house. “Phone for you, Mr. Stone.”
Stone went back into the living room and picked up the phone. “Hello?”
“It’s Jim Hackett,” a voice said. “When are you planning to return to New York?”
“In a matter of minutes,” Stone said. “One of my clients is in a jam, and we’re just leaving for the airport. Do you need the airplane?”
