She sat down again. “Anyway, he was like a kid when he brought me back here to Chicago. I’d been too dumb to know who he was. He had this house designed and built for us, and sold the one in town. He cut his work back to just the experimental part. He didn’t do any routine operations. It gave us more time. But you can guess what his friends and his kids thought. They made him so mad. They looked at me as if I was some kind of a bug. They acted as if marriage was some act of senility or something. I was the smart little operator, a waitress type, who nailed the poor guy when he was depressed about knowing he wasn’t going to get anywhere near three score and ten. And the inference was that I probably liked it better that way. Roger was the worst. He’s twenty-nine. He’s a market analyst. He’s a self-satisfied fink. He had the gall-and the stupidity-to go to Fort and suggest that inasmuch as I’d married him so late in his life, it would be a lot fairer to his kids to just leave me a reasonable bequest in his will. Fort had made a new will by then. It was pretty complicated, with trusts and so on, but the basic idea was he’d leave me half and them each a quarter. I told him I didn’t want to make that kind of hard feeling, and he got so annoyed I had to drop the whole thing. I had to go to the bank with him a few times to see Mr. Andrus, the assistant trust officer, and sign things. He’s very nice. I decided that after it was all over I could talk to him and see about some way of taking just what I’d need to get settled into a new life, and let his children have the rest of it. As it turned out, there was no problem.”
“How do you mean?”
“He just didn’t leave anybody anything. There wasn’t anything left to leave.”
“What do you mean? Had he been kidding people?”
“No. Starting about a year ago in July, he started changing things into cash. Mr. Andrus is going to bring the list around tomorrow. You see, he didn’t have things actually put away in trust where he couldn’t get at them. Mr. Andrus can explain all that. And his lawyers had no way of knowing what he was doing. He just… sold the stock and the bonds and everything and kept putting the money in checking accounts. Then he kept drawing cash. Nobody knows where it went. He mortgaged this house right to the hilt. He cashed in his insurance policies. All but one. I’m the beneficiary on that. And it pays me f-f-four hundred dollars a m-month as long as I… as long as I… I-I…”
“Whoa, girl.”
She rubbed the corduroy sleeve across her eyes. “Damn! I’m not the crying kind. It’s just that everybody has been so damned ugly to me.”
“How much has disappeared?”
“A little over six hundred thousand dollars.”
“In a little over a year!”
“He did it in such a way it wouldn’t attract attention. He opened other checking accounts, and he’d make deposits to other banks by check and then draw the cash. Three was enough for the funeral, and enough to run this house for… oh, until February or March. Roger and Heidi seem to think it’s some kind of cute stunt I’ve pulled. They act as if I’d drugged him or hypnotized him or something. The Internal Revenue people and the state tax people started treating me like a criminal or something. They came with a warrant and they searched every inch of this whole house and made inventories of everything. They kept coming back and asking the same questions. I told Mr. Andrus I couldn’t stand it, and he took me right down to Fort’s attorneys. Waldren, Farhauser and Schrant. Old Mr. Waldren kept asking me questions. He looked as if he was taking a nap all the time I was answering. But finally he said he would see that I was not bothered anymore, but I had better stay right here at the house, for the time being. I know I’m being watched. I think it’s Roger or Heidi though, paying someone to keep an eye on me. I yelled help, Trav. I don’t want the damned money. But I don’t want people following me for the rest of my life trying to catch me with something I haven’t got.”
“Was there any change in Fort’s attitude or manner?”
“When he started selling things? I didn’t notice a thing different. He seemed happy. That’s what I wanted. I mean we couldn’t be all the way happy, knowing the time was growing short. But we could give it a good try. And we did. That’s another thing. I don’t think he was trying to cheat on estate taxes or anything like that. I don’t think he wanted to cash in those things. So somebody was making him do it somehow. And so that was making him unhappy, but he kept it from me. He hid it from me. And I would like to get my hands on somebody who’d do that to him when he had so little time left, damn them.”
“Would the illness affect his mind in any way?”
“Absolutely not!”
“Could he have been planning some… easier way of handling his estate and died before he had a chance to tell you?”
“They kept asking me that, sort of. No. Those last days before he went into a coma, I sat by him all day long. Held his hand. We’d talk. He’d nap and we’d talk more. He had a chance to say everything to me. He knew he was going. And… God, how he hated to leave me. He wasn’t afraid of death. He was a man. It was the same way he used to hate to leave me when he had to go to a meeting. That’s all. How much in love do you have to be before people believe it? I would have burned every inch of all that money to give him one more day.” She stopped looking fierce and glanced at her watch. “Medium rare? Butter on the baked? Garlic dressing?”
“Your memory is still working, kid.”
She trotted out toward the back of the house to tell Anna to serve as soon as it was ready. When she came back I asked her how well-fixed Fort’s children were. She said that Heidi seemed to be doing just fine. She was twenty-five-married at twenty-two and divorced at twenty-four. It had been a second marriage for her husband, Gadge Trumbill, usually referred to in the society pages as a prominent sportsman. When Heidi had tired of Gadge’s fun and games on the side, it was rumored that she employed people thorough enough to make an iron-clad list of positives which had included eleven wives of fellow members of the Harbour Yacht Club, but that the generous settlement and alimony had been the result of the respondent’s unfortunate carelessness in not hiding more successfully his occasional penchant for willowy young men. Heidi Trumbill was living in a studio apartment at 180 East Burton Place, was busily painting very large abstracts, and was showing and selling them at a gallery four blocks away on East Scott Street called Tempo East. Gossip of the more rancid variety pointed out that her partner in the gallery operation, Mark Avanyan, was one of those who had made Gadge’s second divorce considerably more expensive than his first. It made for interesting speculation.
“She is one very icy dish indeed,” said Glory. “Take Grace Kelly like ten years ago, and give her a little more height and heft, and put her in a part where she’s a nun who has to dress in civilian clothes to smuggle the code to the French army, and you’d be close. She’s really beautiful, she’s one of those people you can hardly believe they have even a digestive system. She’s a lot brighter than Roger, I think. He lives in Evanston, where else? He’ll be thirty soon. He works downtown in one of those big new office buildings. He’s a specialist in the commodities market, and his father-in-law is very big in the commodities market. Jeanie, his wife, seems nice enough. She’s one of those brown tennis-playing ones, and they have three kids, and they go to horse shows and eat off the tailgate and talk about hocks and fetlocks and all that.