I simply stared at her. The plunge from euphoria to doom had been too rapid: I had the bends.
She held her hand out for the envelope. “Give it back,” she said, “or I’ll call the stewardess.” She didn’t raise her voice, and yet I could hear every word clearly through the plane noise.
I opened my mouth. At first nothing at all would come, and then I surprised myself by asking, “How long — how long have you had this?”
“Since Friday. Give it back.”
I closed the envelope with clumsy fingers and handed it up to her. “What are you going to do with it?”
“That’s up to you,” she said, and sat down in the nearest chair, facing me slightly from the left.
I gestured at the envelope. “You’re not going to give it, uh, to the police, in other words.”
“Not as long as you do what you’re told.”
Here came the crunch. Watching her carefully, I said, “Liz, what am I going to be told?”
“You’ll live in the house on Saint Croix,” she told me. “By yourself, except for the staff. No women.”
“No women? For God’s sake, what diff—”
“Shut up, Art.” She was all ice. “I’ve inherited from Betty,” she said, “so I’m strong enough now to bounce those freeloading cousins and uncles right out on their asses, and I’m going to do it. Every once in a while you’ll get something in the mail to sign, as my husband. You’ll sign it.”
“Look, Liz—”
“If you don’t sign, or if you leave, the houseboy will call me in New York, and this evidence goes to the Suffolk County District Attorney.”
Was it something I could live with? I said, “For how long, Liz?”
“Till the lawsuits are over.”
“Six months? A year?”
Grinning, she said, “More like ten years. Maybe fifteen.”
“Good Christ!”
Holding the envelope, she got to her feet and said, “You ought to come down and watch the movie. It’s a comedy, take your mind off your troubles.” And she started away.
“No!” I couldn’t let it happen like this, I just couldn’t let it happen. Jumping up from the chair, I lunged after her, to hold her, stop her, force her to listen until I found the right things to say. Angry, she pulled away from me and cried, “I’ll call the stewardess if you try anything with me!” And turned toward the stairs.
Among the beverages on the counter to my left was an unopened quart bottle of Popov vodka. I picked it up and let her have it across the side of the head. And, as she tottered into the stairwell, I plucked the envelope out of her opening hand.
57
The airline was very relieved when I decided not to be difficult after all. At first I made distraught references to overly steep and narrow spiral staircases, obvious safety hazard, I’d have my attorney look into previous damage suits, etc., etc., and generally I made as much noise and trouble as I could without making any real noise or any real trouble.
But the airline executives who flocked to San Juan and to my side like sparrows to a suet ball didn’t know any of the background. All they knew was that the 747 spiral staircase had been criticized by safety experts in the past, and that now they had a dead woman and distraught husband on their hands. A rich dead woman and a rich distraught husband. So they stroked my shoulders and they offered me sympathy and Jack Daniels and they spoke as emotionally as I did about this unfortunate and unforeseeable accident. (However, they did also mention from time to time that the autopsy would determine the alcohol level in Liz at the moment of her final flight; they did drop that fact in from time to time.)
In addition to compassion for my trouble and a mortician for my bride, the airline did at last also lay on a suite at the El San Juan, in which I was to rest and recover from my emotional ordeal. Once alone in a room dominated by sun plaques, I placed an immediate call to Leek, Conchell & McPoo, got through to Gordon Alworthy, the legal assistant who had sent out that package of trouble to begin with, and told him the situation in twenty-five words or less. “Elizabeth Kerner is dead,” I said. “I am Arthur Dodge, her heir and now controller of the Kerner interests. I want you on your way to San Juan by the next available plane, at Kerner expense, to handle the legal problems at this end.”
He grasped the situation at once, as I’d known he would, and made a penetrating and brilliant remark. “Yes, sir,” he said.
58
Gordon Alworthy was five feet two inches tall and as thin as the ice I was skating on. He had blond hair and blond eyebrows and an open boyish smile and a soft amiable manner of speech and a mind like an Arab oil minister. The airline’s attorneys tended to chuckle when they first met him, and to be frowning later when they left his presence. I trusted him as far as I could pay him.
We spent four days in San Juan together, with frequent conference calls to other legal minds back in the New York office of Leek, Conchell & McPoo, and at the end of it I knew I never would have been able to do it on my own. And yet how easy it had been, with Alworthy.
Which was another fact I’d never before entirely understood about money; it buys brains and expertise to supplement your own. I’d gone pretty far with nothing but my own native wit and talent for scrambling to sustain me, farther in fact than I’d ever dreamed of going, and now I was at a plateau where I didn’t have to do much of anything any more. If a drink was required, I could push a button and a drink would be brought to me. If conniving was called for, I could hire a fella who’d been taught conniving at Harvard Law School.
How much Gordon Alworthy knew or suspected I didn’t know, nor did I care. Even assuming the worst, that he had read those damaging documents before sending them to Liz, what did it matter? If he turned me in it would cost him his job. The Kerner estate would be thrown into a chaos of cousins and uncles, and Gordon Alworthy would be thrown back into the faceless mélange of young assistant attorneys at Leek, Conchell & McPoo. Would he turn me in? Would you?
Neither did Gordon Alworthy.
The airline paid off, of course. If I’d been a poor man, an insurance salesman grabbing a week in the sun with his bride, it would have cost the airline five or ten thousand, no more. If I’d been moderately well off, it might have cost them a hundred thousand. But I was rich now, I had so many lumber mills behind me I looked like an exercise in perspective, so what I cost the airline was a feeder route between two Canadian cities.
The Kerners already had a Canadian airline — Laurentian Interior Air Service — but prior to this it had been strictly a small cargo carrier, principally of goods manufactured by other Kerner holdings. I was happy that my first act as head of the Kerner business empire was to diversify into yet another area of commerce. The new passenger division of our airline I dubbed Laurentian Interior Zealandia; we did not actually service Zealandia, a a town of two hundred souls in Saskatchewan, but that way the company’s initials could be LIZ. She had, after all, made it possible; it was the least I could do.
59
Carlos was grumpy at being fired, but there was no point keeping him on. I would drive the Alfa myself mostly, or at times I might take the wheel of the Thunderbird I’d inherited from my brother, but the Lincoln I would sell, replacing it with a limousine service on an annual contract for those rare occasions when a chauffeured vehicle was needed. The car would come only when called for, and the driver need not be housed or fed. It was more economical, and more sensible as well.