“Timmy came through all of that less traumatized than you might expect,” I said. “In fact, he’s so enthusiastic about Thailand that we’ll probably take a winter vacation there.”
“If we’re there at the same time, maybe you could join us for dinner at the Oriental. You could pay. On second thought, that might not work. Bill still holds you responsible for siding with Gary in his absurd attempt to give away Algonquin Steel to a group of religious fanatics.”
“I know you’re not in touch with Gary,” I said. “I’ve spoken to him a few times in Key West. He seems to be doing okay, but he did not speak well of either of you two.”
“No, the misunderstandings between us were just too ugly and complicated to sort out. It’s all just kind of sad and pathetic, is what it all is.”
“Gary was especially disturbed to find out that the two men who extorted two million dollars from him, Duane Hubbard and Matthew Mertz, died in falls from a building half a dozen blocks from here not long after we all got back from Thailand.
He thinks you and your husband had something to do with their deaths.”
She sighed theatrically and slowly shook her head. “Here we go again!”
“I guess it is far-fetched,” I said. “Unless, of course, the sex-movie DVD you showed Pugh and me in Bangkok wasn’t the proof-of-murder recording those guys claimed to possess, and there was a second, very different CD somewhere that some of us have never seen. And Hubbard and Mertz tried to blackmail 278 Richard Stevenson you and Bill a second time. And you had had just about enough of those two bozos, and you hired somebody else — is there a Thai community here in Albany? — to get those two pests out of your hair once and for all.”
She looked at me evenly and said, “You know, Strachey, when I hired you, I have to admit I wasn’t sure what my own motives were. I really did care what happened to Gary. I loved him once — for his moral seriousness and for his truly good heart. And I really did not want anything terrible to happen to him or to his money. But I confess I was also worried at the time about whether Duane and Matthew had turned up in Bangkok and maybe planted some screwy ideas in Gary’s head.
Idiotic ideas like the one you have just outlined. And lo and behold, it turned out that that’s precisely what happened. I thought you might smoke all that out, and you did. So I guess I must be some kind of soothsayer myself, wouldn’t you say?”
“I want you to know, Ellen,” I said, “that Timothy and I live just over on Crow Street in a two-story townhouse. We don’t plan on moving into a high-rise building in the foreseeable future. Or maybe even visiting one for a while.”
She seemed to decide that I was joking, and let loose with a good-natured snort.