“Now you’ve lost me, sweetheart. More coffee?”
“I better run. If you get a chance, find out about the suit the cleaner lost.”
Ruth McGann switched it off. “You’re a little wooden, but it’s good enough. Let’s get these others done.”
There was one where she pried into the profitability of Wyro until he told her that their next quarterly earnings statement was going to be about half what had been estimated, and another where he told her he had decided to break off negotiations to acquire Henderson Homes.
After she had listened intently to the playback, Ruth turned off the equipment and sighed, plucked the two wads of pink plastic substance from her mouth, and got up and went into the bathroom. When she came back she said in her normal voice, “That should do it.”
“But what happens next? How can Russo explain the reason the tapes were made in the first place?”
“There’s a lot of options. He won’t come into it at all. Somebody will show up with the tapes. In the interest of fair play and all that. Mr. Russo makes everything logical. Don’t worry about it. It will all fit together. I could make a guess, but it won’t mean much.”
“Go ahead.”
“Some woman hired an investigator to get the goods on your Mary Lou and her husband. So the investigator bugged the house, and because it isn’t exactly legal, he sends the tapes in with an anonymous letter of explanation, sends them to your attorneys.”
“That won’t be enough.”
“Not without some trimmings. Maybe a fake phone tap, Mary Lou talking to an unidentified boyfriend.” She switched to Mary Lou’s voice. “Sweetheart, I’m doing the best I can, I really am. I mean I’ve never paid much attention to all this business stuff in the past. I’ve been asking him everything you told me to ask him, lover, and I’ve been telling you everything he says, but when can we stop all this? When will you have enough money so we can go away, my dearest? I think of you every living minute of the day and night, honest. I love you so.”
He found that he was standing. And roaring. “No, dammit! I won’t stand for that!”
“Dearie, you were very shifty the way you worked those accounts. Nobody can tie you directly to them, Mr. Russo says. But he says you were stupid with the timing, because you made your moves in the market on the basis of information known to you alone. He says you were greedy-stupid, getting in at the bottom and out at the top. And you pulled the cash out in a way that it can’t be traced back to you.”
“I had to do something! Too many things started to go wrong all at the same time.”
“We all have our little rationalizations, sugar. You made your moves and you siphoned off the cash, and if you hadn’t you couldn’t afford Russo to get you into the clear. But you didn’t declare it, and you haven’t planned on paying taxes on it. And unless you can throw them some alternative, you get your pick of Leavenworth or Atlanta or some other garden spot.”
“But I was doing it for...”
Wise and crooked smile, too old for her mouth and face. “For the wife and kiddies? Come on! Any way you deal the hand, you’ve lost your Mary Lou. Best to set it up to look as if somebody was using her. Otherwise she could get clipped for tax evasion. After they play the tapes and question her, and after you testify that those are conversations you had with your wife, you think she’ll forgive and forget?”
“No.”
“If there has to be more trimmings, Mr. Russo will provide them. A motel witness. Look at it this way. In the clear you can afford to give her big alimony. If they nail you, she might have to work waitress to support those kids.”
He sat on the couch, elbows on his knees, forehead resting on the heels of his hands, shoulders hunched high. Did not know he was weeping silently until he felt the tickle of the tears. Ruth McGann was pulling out the interconnecting jacks, putting the equipment into fitted cases.
On one inhalation he made a loud and inadvertent snorting sound. She sat beside him and said softly, “Hey. Hey, now.”
“I can’t... can’t...” Voice gritty and strangled.
Strong grasp pulled the nearest hand away. Warm hand against his far cheek, turning his face toward her.
“Poor sad sorry bastard,” she whispered, her face soft. Hand still on his cheek, she ran the ball of her thumb across the wetness under his eye. “Is it for real?” she asked.
“That’s... the worst part, Ruth. I don’t know... how much I mean it... or if I mean it at all.”
“I know. So later on you can tell yourself that when it happened, you cried.”
“How do you know so much?”
“When I was fifteen I was the voice of seventeen or eighteen rotten little animals in cheap commercials, dearie. It kept me from ever having anything of my own to say.” She leaned close and put her mouth on his, her lips soft, clever, unendingly sweet.
After he had his arms around her, tilting her back, she pushed him away. She mocked herself with her smile. “Okay, so I have this Earth Mother kick. The sky fell on your head, and you are pretty rotten. Go yank those draperies across, honey.”
Then after they were in the bed, her exhalations explosive at each readying caress, her body lifting and wanting, she stopped him as he moved to enter her, her face sweaty in the half light, seen through the tumble of her hair.
Breathing like a runner, she said, “The worst part. Sure. Not knowing how much I mean this. Or. Or if I mean... if I mean it at all, dearie. Or. Or ever can.”
“Shut up. Shut up.”
“I don’t like. Don’t like either one of us, love. Is that why I’m so ready? Is that how? How I know I’m going to make it?”
“Shut up.”
“All right. Come on then, Chief Executive Officer of Everything.”
Four months and four days later, he awoke from a Sunday afternoon nap in the beachfront cabana at the new hotel in Puerto Rico. The dream had sweated him, soured his mouth. In the dream he stood small before a judicial bench so high that he could not see the face of the sentencing judge. Hollow, solemn, echoing voice. “Wyatt Rutherford Ross, this Court finds you guilty of hannenframmis in the first, second, and third degree.”
Terror. “Your Honor! Your Honor! I don’t understand the charge.”
“And sentences you to three consecutive terms of life imprisonment. May God have mercy on the soul you should have had.”
“Your Honor! I can’t even see you.”
He got up and padded into the bathroom and rinsed his mouth. He looked at his sunbrown holiday face in the mirror and said, “I plead guilty to hannenframmis in all the degrees you got, baby.”
He went back into the bedroom and found his damp swim trunks and pulled them on. Tuck the dream away. Hide it behind the well-remembered newspaper features. Ross cleared on stock manipulation charges. Executive’s wife implicated in information leak. Surprise tapes played in closed committee session. Mrs. Wyatt Ross denies love affair, says evidence is faked. Surprise witness heard in closed session. Hotel registrations subpoenaed. Wife refuses to reveal identity of mystery man, denies his existence.
SEC clears officers of Wyro International Services. Trading in Wyro resumed. Divorce action filed. Kallen acquisition plans dropped by Wyro owing to drop in price of Wyro common after release of earnings report. Wyatt Ross announces spin-off of three earlier acquisitions, concentration on the most profitable product lines and services, improved future earnings through internal growth instead of acquisition route.
Done. For half a million dollars fed cautiously into the channel that ran from New York, to Miami, to Nassau, to Zurich, and into the proper account, the number furnished by a small, quiet, dead-faced man named Willy Russo. So he’d moved his own through the same pipeline, what he had left after Russo’s bite, into the number account he’d set up three years ago, along with orders to keep the money working, make it grow. The Swiss have a talent for it.