"How did your husband die, Mrs. Packer?" Mike asked.
"You can call me Cherry; everyone else does." Cherry sniffed.
"How did Bobby die?"
"He had a heart attack," she said flatly. "They killed him anyway."
"He had the attack at the time of his beating?"
"No, about a month later."
"That's too bad. When was that?"
"Five years ago." She teared up and reached for a tissue.
"All right, so Bobby died. Then what happened?"
"Look, I didn't kill anybody. I don't even know who died. What does he have to do with me?"
"Do you know what an accessory is, Cherry?"
"Yeah, hat, bag, belt. Necklace." She laughed at her own joke.
"No, the other kind, when you help someone who committed a crime. You don't tell the cops something important because you don't want to hurt someone who helped you out a long time ago."
"I don't know anything, and that's the truth. I don't know why you want to talk to me. I have nothing to say."
"You know, if you're an accessory to a crime, you can go to jail for almost as long as the guy who did the crime. The law says you're a crook, too." Mike tapped his fingers.
"Harry's a good guy," she said softly. "He wouldn't kill anybody. He told me that."
"Then what were you doing in White Plains, honey bee? Why did Harry call you and tell you to get out of your house?"
"He didn't. I went to visit friends."
"Oh, yeah, what friends?"
"Her brother got sick. He had to go to the emergency room." Cherry looked at herself in the viewing-window mirror, not at Mike.
"What are you talking about? You're not making sense. Come on, you're heading into the racing season, and you left your horses to visit imaginary friends in a run-down dump? Nobody shows any respect for my intelligence."
"It was tough. We'd already lost a lot of business. We had a few horses left. I wanted to keep the stables."
Mike frowned. Where was she going now? "Whose stables?"
"Mine. Well, they were my dad's. He passed on in 'sixty-eight. They've been mine since then." She heaved another sigh.
"Cherry, you're digressing." Mike checked his watch again.
"I'm not undressing," she said angrily. She didn't have much of a vocabulary. Mike suppressed a smile.
"Harry gave you some money." He tried to lead her back.
"He didn't give me any money. He invested in a very promising three-year-old," she said defensively. "He's going to get it back in spades."
"I'll bet. Did Harry tell you how he got the money?"
Cherry squirmed a little. "No, of course not."
"Oh, come on. He's been your close friend for fifteen years. He's helped you out of trouble-I'm guessing here-over and over these past fifteen years."
She lifted a shoulder.
"Then suddenly out of nowhere he comes up with the money to buy one of your horses and doesn't tell you where he got it? Harry, who's always a little short himself? Come on, you can go to jail for lying to me."
"Look, he told me a friend won the lottery."
"Cherry, that friend was murdered last week. Your boyfriend is linked. We need answers to tie him in or let him go, understand?"
She nodded. "I do. But Harry didn't give me the money last week. He gave it to me a month ago, before Harry's friend died."
"A month ago?" Mike was flabbergasted. If that checked out, then Harry was telling the truth. A first!
"Yeah. What's the matter?"
"How about some breakfast, huh? Marcus here will get you whatever you want, okay? See you later."
Mike was out the door before she could say another word. A month ago. The money had changed hands almost as soon as it had come in. That meant Bernardino had given it to his friend, but why? The rest of the day April and Mike worked on Harry and Cherry, trying to get at why so they could eliminate Harry as a suspect, but Harry and Cherry weren't saying. With Bill still the prime suspect, maybe the why didn't matter. Maybe it was just one of those things: Bernardino got generous; Harry got lucky. End of story. April didn't believe it. Mike didn't believe it either.
Thirty-two
By the time Birdie Bassett's York U dinner came up, she had already lunched with the president of the Museum of Modern Art and the chairman of Lincoln Center, both friends of Max's, who were suddenly eager to acknowledge her as a friend. People were moving on her fast, and she was getting a sense of how the giving game was played. If she had five million a year to give away, that made her a very desirable acquisition to anyone's donor list. She was getting a crash course in having the power to decide where a lot of money was going to go. It meant jobs and careers and programs, prestige, and it was entirely a personal thing, just as Al Frayme had told her it would be.
Much of the time grant making was about connecting with the person who made the ask, and not about the cause itself. Since all kinds of people were bothering her with their impassioned requests, Birdie couldn't evaluate whose cause really appealed to her. People were pushing her in all directions, and it was a little scary. Voice mail was a step away from the human voice, but that didn't afford much of a buffer. On the computer, the list of begging e-mails grew every day.
"How do these people find me?" she wailed when Al called her over the weekend.
"People read the obits," he told her. "They target the heirs."
"But why do people give?"
"Cultivation. It takes time to break down a natural resistance." He laughed. "What's funny about it?"
"Everybody wants to be loved, Birdie. And believe me, rich people feel guilty about being rich. They need to unload some of their good fortune."
Birdie knew that Al had been cultivating her for years, hoping for some of that Bassett money. "Giving money away responsibly is not as easy as you might think," she'd murmured, aware that she sounded a little like Max, just a little pompous.
"Whatever happened to loyalty, Birdie? You know it wouldn't hurt you the tiniest bit to send a few mil our way." Al's response came in a flash of anger.
She wasn't surprised. The truth was, all fund-raisers felt that way. It wouldn't hurt her, so why didn't she just do what they wanted? Well, in this case, she just didn't believe that York U needed money as badly as Al Frayme said it did. So there. She knew the university was very well off. With all the prime real estate it had, she was sure her alma mater was doing just fine. And the truth also was that something about Al Frayme had always annoyed and irritated her. And because of that, she'd decided that ten thousand was quite enough for the university-enough to get her into the President's Circle, where dinner was served on a regular basis. It was personal, after alclass="underline" She just didn't want to give it to him. But she didn't tell him that on Wednesday morning. She'd told him the ten was all she had at the moment. He tried to talk the figure up, but she remained firm.
"Nothing more for this year. We'll see how it goes. Maybe next year."
He seemed to take it graciously, but now it was evening, and he hadn't come to the dinner. She thought his behavior was just plain rude. Ten thousand wasn't chicken feed. She kept looking around for him. She'd expected to sit next to him, but he wasn't there among the company in the special dining room that consisted of a number of potential heavy-hitting donors, alums like herself, various members of the university's board of directors, the new president, John Warmsley, his new vice president, Wendy Vivendi, several old deans and two new ones: Diana Crease of the School of Social Work and Michael Abend of the Law School. Wendy Vivendi, who turned out to be the head fund-raiser of the university, was gracious and unreadable. But Al himself was simply not present.
After a glass of wine Birdie found herself not minding that much. She was with the kind of expensively dressed people she'd come to know and understand in her years of marriage to Max. This group conversed earnestly about important subjects like their summer traveling plans. No one talked money. They talked possessions-houses, boats, trips. Name brands, but never money.