“How do you know Paige?” I asked.
Jeannine turned her tear-streaked face to me for the first time since I’d mentioned the invoices. “How do I know her? She’s my sister. Why wouldn’t I know her?”
“Your sister!” We sounded like a couple of damned parrots. “Sisters. I see.” Actually, I didn’t see a thing. I sat down. “Did you take her to the party where she met my cousin?”
She looked surprised. “What party was that?”
“I don’t know who gave it. Probably Guy Odinflute. He lives around here, doesn’t he? Niels Grafalk was interested in buying a share in the Black Hawks. My cousin came up along with some of the other players. Paige was there and she met my cousin. I want to know who brought her.”
Jeannine swallowed a sly smile. “That party. No, we didn’t go.”
“But were you invited?”
“Mr. Odinflute may have asked us… We get asked to a lot of parties at Christmas. If you want to know who Paige went with, though, you ask her.”
I looked at her narrowly: she knew, but she wouldn’t tell. I turned my attention to the money. “Tell me about the invoices, Jeannine.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Sure you do. You just said he’d promised no one would ever know. I called about them Saturday night-left a message with your son Paul. What did your husband do next?”
She shed a few more tears but in the end it came out that she didn’t know. They got back late. Paul had left the message by the kitchen phone. When Clayton saw it, he went into his study and shut the door. He made a phone call and left a few minutes later. No, not in the Alfa. Had someone picked him up? She didn’t know. He was very upset and told her not to bother him. It was about one-thirty Sunday morning when he went out. That was the last time she ever saw him.
“Now tell me about the invoices, Jeannine. He was padding them, wasn’t he?”
She didn’t say anything.
“People would give him bids on Eudora Grain cargoes and he would log the orders at one price but bill them at another. Is that right.”
She started crying again. “I don’t know. I don’t know.”
“You don’t know how he worked it, but you know he was doing it. That’s true, isn’t it?”
“I didn’t ask, as long as the bills got paid.” She was sobbing harder.
I was losing my temper. “Did you know what your husband’s salary was?”
“Of course I knew what Clayton earned.” Her tears stopped long enough for her to glare at me.
“Sure you did. And you knew ninety-two thousand, however good it looks compared to the other girls at Park Forest South High, or whatever it was, wasn’t enough to pay for a boat. This house. Your designer clothes. The kid at Claremont. Those high-ticket cars. The Izod T-shirts little Terri runs around in. Dues at the Maritime Club. Just out of curiosity, what does the Maritime Club run you a year? I was betting twenty-five thousand.”
“You don’t understand!” She sat up and stared at me with fierce, angry eyes. “You don’t know what it’s like when all the other girls have everything they want and you’re making do with last year’s clothes.”
This sounded like a real heartache to me. “You’re right-I don’t. My high school, most of us girls had a couple of dresses we started with as sophomores and wore out the door when we graduated. Park Forest South may be a bit tonier than South Chicago-but not a lot.”
“Park Forest South! My mother moved there later. We grew up here in Lake Bluff. We had horses. My father kept a boat. We lived down the road from here. Then he lost everything. Everything. I was a junior in high school. Paige was only eight. She’s too young to remember the humiliation. The way people stared in school. Mother sold the silver. She sold her own jewels. But it didn’t do any good. He shot himself and we moved away. She couldn’t stand the pity people like old Mrs. Grafalk dished out at the country club. And I had to go to Roosevelt instead of Northwestern.”
“So you decided you were going to move back here, no matter what it took. What about your husband? He a Lake Bluffer in exile who made his way back?”
“Clayton came from Toledo. Eudora Grain brought him here when he was twenty-five. He rented an apartment in Park Forest and we met there.”
“And you thought he had possibilities, that he might go all the way for you. When did you find out that wasn’t going to happen?”
“When Terri was born. We were still living in that crappy three-bedroom house.” She was screaming now. “Terri and Ann had to share a room. I was buying all my clothes at Wieboldt’s. I couldn’t stand it! I couldn’t stand it anymore. And there was Paige. She was only eighteen, but she already knew-knew-”
“Knew what, Jeannine?”
She recovered some of her control. “Knew how to get people to help her out,” she said quietly.
“Okay. You didn’t want Paige outdressing you. So you put pressure on your husband to come up with more money. He knew he was never going to have enough if he just struggled along on his salary. So he decided to skim something off the top before it ever hit Eudora’s books. Did he fiddle with anything besides the invoices?”
“No, it was just the invoices. He could make-make-about a hundred thousand extra a year from them. He-he didn’t do it with all the orders, only about ten percent. And he paid taxes on them.”
“Paid taxes on them?” I echoed incredulously.
“Yes. We didn’t want to run-run a risk with the IRS auditing us. We called it commission income. They don’t know what his job’s supposed to be like. They don’t know whether he should be earning commissions or not.”
“And then my cousin found out. He was going through the papers, trying to see what a regional manager does to run an office like that, and he ended up comparing some invoices with the original contract orders.”
“It was terrible,” she gulped. “He threatened to tell David Argus. It would have meant the end of-of Clayton’s career. He would have been fired. We would have had to sell the house. It would have been-”
“Spare me,” I said harshly. A pulse throbbed in my right temple. “It was a choice between the Maritime Club and my cousin’s life.”
She didn’t say anything. I grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her. “Answer me, damn you! You decided my cousin had to die to keep you in your Massandrea dresses. Is that what happened? Is it?”
In my rage I had lifted her from her wing chair and was shaking her. Mrs. Carrington came bustling into the room.
“What is going on here?” she fussed behind me. I was still screaming at Jeannine. Mrs. Carrington grabbed my arm. “I think you’d better go now. My daughter cannot afford any more upsets. If you don’t leave, I will call the police.”
Somehow her scratchy voice penetrated and I forced my anger back. “You’re right. I’m sorry, Mrs. Carrington. I’m afraid I got carried away by my work.” I turned to Jeannine. “Just one more question before I leave you to your mourning. What was Paige’s role in all this?”
“Paige?” she whispered, rubbing her shoulders where I had grabbed them. She gave the sly smile I’d seen earlier. “Oh, Paige was supposed to keep track of what Boom Boom was up to. But you’d better talk to her. She hasn’t given away my secrets. I won’t give away hers.”
“That’s right,” Mrs. Carrington said. “You girls should be loyal to each other. After all, you’re all that you have.”
“Besides a boat and a condo on Astor Place,” I said.
24 A Question of Policy
I was sick by the side of the road as soon as I got to the end of the drive. Terri rode up on her bicycle, a Peugeot ten-speed, I noticed as I wiped my mouth with a Kleenex. Boom Boom, you did not die in vain if you preserved a French racing bicycle for that girl.
I walked slowly down the road to the Omega and sat in it for a long time without starting the engine. My shoulder ached from grabbing Jeannine and lifting her up.