“Then what happened?” Annie said. “Pamela trotted you out to the family as a symbol of her tiny rebellion?”
“Not that crass,” I said. “In the gesture department, I was a large cut above brassiere-burning. Pamela cared for me. Genuinely.”
“Well,” Annie said, “shows her innate good taste.”
“Put it like this,” I said. “It added a dash of piquancy to the love affair that I was the only man she brought home who didn’t have his own boat over at the Royal Canadian Yacht Club.”
“You had boxing gloves.”
“Things went along, three, four years of marriage, and I seemed less exotic to Pamela.”
“She must have met your clients.”
“She ran out of rebellion,” I said. “Her gang went to Lyford Cay for February, flats in Belgravia, walking trips up Kilimanjaro. I didn’t fit in with the gang. Pamela stayed home with me out of loyalty, but she felt on the sidelines.”
Annie put down her knife and fork and whistled the first bars of “April in Paris.”
“Eventually she went,” I said. “As the unattached spouse.”
Annie touched my arm.
“Never mind, Crang,” she said. “I’m prying too much.”
“She had an affair with a Swedish guy she met at a hotel on Sardinia.”
“Really? How’d you feel?” Annie asked. She was getting right back into it.
“Lousy,” I said. “For about a day and a half. What made it less painful is I’d already been through the hard part. I knew the thing between Pamela and me had gone to its grave long before she admitted it to anyone. To me, anyway.”
“Prescient you.”
“Hardly,” I said. “One time I remember, watershed event, Pamela flew to Acapulco with a woman named Sass, her first excursion without me. Sass told her what to pack. New bikini, Sonia Rykiel sundresses, a bottle of Joy. Get my drift? Sass was the bad kid in the gang, and when Pamela came back, she was changed in ways that told me our marriage wouldn’t last into the sunset years.”
“What ways?” Annie said. “She cancelled her subscription to Ms.? What? Took Amnesty International off her list of charities?”
“Let’s just say,” I said, “I knew Pamela was on her way home to the family and all that that entails.”
Annie picked up her paper napkin from her lap and wiped very slowly around her mouth. She was fighting the urge to ask me more specifics about the change in Pamela after Acapulco. She won the fight.
“Where’s Pamela got to?” she asked. It was a neutral question. “Since you and she broke up, I mean.”
“She married a guy named Archie. His daddy’s firm, Archie’s now, makes cellophane wrappers.”
“The kind you put peanuts in? I don’t believe it,” Annie said. “For crackers? That kind of cellophane?”
“I didn’t say the old family businesses had to do something distinguished.”
“Lot of money in cellophane, I suppose,” Annie said.
“It puts Archie close to Pamela’s league,” I said. “They’ve got a house in Ardwold Gate and a daughter at Branksome.”
“What’s her name? The daughter?”
“Cordelia.”
“They slipped up there,” Annie said. “The kid’s buddies’ll have to call her Cord.”
I was using the fries to sop up the nice red stuff that had oozed out of the hamburger on to my plate.
“What about you?” Annie asked. “I know why old Pamela went into the marriage. How was it from your side?”
“Easy,” I said. “She was beautiful, hell of a dresser, knew how to get off a great line, and I was crazy about her.”
“Well, I asked, didn’t I.”
“There was something else,” I said. “I was young and foolish.”
Annie leaned on her elbows. Her face was about a foot from mine, and it had a sly grin.
“Now,” she said, “you’re up for somebody mature.”
“Close call between you and Cybill Shepherd. You win.”
Annie had something with whipped cream for dessert. I ordered another hamburger, never mind the fries.
“Your client might have made an apt second-time-around guy for Pamela,” Annie said.
“Wansborough?” I said. “You just insulted Pamela.”
“Yeah, I guess,” Annie said. “Except for this cellophane blind spot, she shapes up okay.”
Annie fiddled at the whipped-cream concoction.
“Fact is,” she said, hesitancy in her voice, “about Mr. Wansborough and his gang and your involvement with them, I seem to be experiencing, as of today, this severe bout of ambivalence.”
I said, “One guy you haven’t met, you don’t like the sound of. Wansborough. The other guy you have met, you don’t like the looks of. Grimaldi. What’s ambivalent?”
“You left out I think it’s unnecessarily dangerous for you to get mixed up in any kind of violent nonsense.”
“I rest my case against ambivalence.”
Annie’s upper lip had a line of whipped cream running from one corner of her mouth to the other.
She said, “Alice Brackley’s been really on my mind. I met her only those two times, not enough to get tight with her, but I told you this morning, she was the kind of woman I wouldn’t have minded seeing a lot more. Now she’s dead.”
I chewed my hamburger and waited for Annie to go on. She took her time.
“Supposing,” she said, “just supposing you figure out what’s going on at Ace Disposal, the illegal dealing or whatnot, maybe you’ll point the police at Alice’s killer at the same time. For me, that’s definitely on the approved list as long as you don’t do anything fantastically ridiculous.”
Annie wiped the back of her left hand across her upper lip and looked at the residue of whipped cream.
“How long have you let me sit here with this fine mess on my face?” she said.
“Homey as Norman Rockwell,” I said. “I like that in a woman. Shows you have no airs.”
“Next you’ll let me slaver in public.”
I said, “The contenders for guilty party in Alice’s murder come from a small group and not all that select.”
“You deduce.”
“My conversation with Tony Flanagan helped narrow the field,” I said. “But pinning the killer is secondary to what I’m hired to get done.”
“By me, it’s all that counts,” Annie said. “Who cares about a few hundred thousand dollars when the man who might lose them wouldn’t notice anyway?”
“Wansborough notices,” I said. “Rich men stay rich by noticing.”
“And, by extension, so does his lawyer,” Annie said.
“One step at a time,” I said. “Tomorrow morning, Harry Hein should be able to tell me the nature of the scam Charles Grimaldi is working at Ace. That information may provide the leverage to squeeze Wansborough’s investment out of Ace.