The Second Time Around Read online

  “Good God, I can use one.”

  We went down to the bar on the lobby floor and were directed to a table. It was four-thirty.

  “I have a firm rule not to have vodka straight up before five o’clock,” Sam told me, “but, as you’re aware, somewhere in the world it is five o’clock.”

  I ordered a glass of Chianti. Usually by late April I’d have switched to chardonnay, my warm weather choice of vino, but feeling as emotionally chilled as I did after that meeting, I wanted something that would warm me up.

  Sam gave the order, then abruptly asked, “So what do you think, Carley? Is that crook sunning himself in Brazil as we speak?”

  I gave the only honest answer I could offer: “I don’t know.”

  “I met Spencer once,” Sam said. “I swear if he’d offered to sell me the Brooklyn Bridge, I’d have fallen for it. What a snake oil salesman. Did you ever meet him in the flesh?”

  I pondered Sam’s question for a moment, trying to decide what to say. The fact that Lynn Hamilton Spencer was my stepsister, making Nick Spencer my stepbrotherin-law, was something I never talked about. However, that fact did keep me from ever commenting publicly or privately on Gen-stone as an investment because I felt that might be considered a conflict of interest. Unfortunately, it did not keep me from buying $25,000 worth of Gen-stone stock because, as Nicholas Spencer had put it that evening at dinner, after this vaccine eliminated the possibility of cancer, there would someday be another to eliminate all genetic abnormalities.

  My baby had been baptized the day he was born. I’d called him Patrick, giving him my maternal grandfather’s name. I bought that stock as kind of a tribute to my son’s memory. That night two years ago Nick had said that the more money they could raise, the faster they would have the tests on the vaccine completed and be able to make it available. “And, of course, eventually your twenty-five thousand dollars will be worth a great deal more,” he had added.

  That money had represented my savings toward a down payment on an apartment.

  I looked at Sam and smiled, still debating my answer. Sam’s hair is a kind of grizzled gray. His one vanity is to comb long strands of it over his balding dome. I’ve noticed that these strands often are somewhat askew, as they were now, and as an old pal I’ve had to resist saying, “Surrender. You’ve lost the hair battle.”

  Sam is pushing seventy, but his baby blue eyes are bright and alert. There’s nothing babyish behind that pucklike face, however. He’s smart and shrewd. I realized it wouldn’t be fair not to tell him of my somewhat tenuous connection to the Spencers, but I would make it clear that I’d actually met Nick only once and Lynn three times.

  I watched his eyebrows raise as I filled him in on the relationship.

  “She comes through as a pretty cool customer to me,” he said. “What about Spencer?”

  “I would have bought the Brooklyn Bridge from him, too. I thought he was a terrific guy.”

  “What do you think now?”

  “You mean, whether he’s dead or somehow arranged the crash? I don’t know.”

  “What about the wife, your stepsister?”

  I know I winced. “Sam, my mother is genuinely happy with Lynn’s father, or else she’s putting on one hell of a performance. God help us, the two of them are even taking piano lessons together. You should have heard the concert I got treated to when I went down to Boca for a weekend last month. I admit I didn’t like Lynn when I met her. I think she kisses the mirror every morning. But then, I only saw her the night before the wedding, at the wedding, and one other time when I arrived in Boca last year just as she was leaving. So do me a favor and don’t refer to her as my stepsister.”

  “Noted.”

  The waitress came with our drinks. Sam sipped appreciatively and then cleared his throat. “Carley, I just heard that you applied for the job that’s opening up at the magazine.”

  “Yes.”

  “How come?”

  “I want to write for a serious financial magazine, not just have a column that is essentially a financial filler in a general interest Sunday supplement. Reporting for Wall Street Weekly is my goal. How do you know I applied?”

  “The big boss, Will Kirby, asked about you.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “I said you had brains and you’d be a big step up from the guy who’s leaving.”

  Half an hour later Sam dropped me off in front of my place. I live in the second-floor apartment of a converted brownstone on East 37th Street in Manhattan. I ignored the elevator, which deserves to be ignored, and walked up the single flight. It was a relief to unlock my door and go inside. I was down in the dumps for very good reasons. The financial situation of those investors had gotten to me, but it was more than that. Many of them had made the investment for the same reason I had, because they wanted to stop the progress of an illness in someone they loved. It was too late for me, but I know that buying that stock as a tribute to Patrick was also my way of trying to cure the hole in my heart that was even bigger than the one that had killed my little son.

  My apartment is furnished with chattels my parents had in the house in Ridgewood, New Jersey, where I was raised. Because I’m an only child, I had my choice of everything when they moved to Boca Raton. I reupholstered the couch in a sturdy blue fabric to pick up the blue in the antique Persian I’d found at a garage sale. The tables and lamps and easy chair were around when I was the smallest but fastest kid on the varsity basketball team at Immaculate Heart Academy.

  I keep a picture of the team on the wall in the bedroom, and in it I hold the basketball. I look at the picture and see that in many ways I haven’t changed. The short dark hair and the blue eyes I inherited from my father are still the same. I never did have that spurt of growth my mother assured me I’d experience. I was just over five feet four inches then, and I’m five feet four inches now. Alas, the victorious smile isn’t around anymore, not the way it was in that picture, when I thought the world was my oyster. Writing the column may have something to do with that. I’m always in touch with real people with real financial problems.

  But I knew there was another reason for feeling drained and down tonight.

  Nick. Nicholas Spencer. No matter how overwhelming the apparent evidence, I simply could not accept what they were saying about him.

  Was there another answer for the failure of the vaccine, the disappearance of the money, the plane crash? Or was it something in me that let me be conned by smooth-talking phonies who don’t give a damn about anyone but themselves? Like I was by Greg, the Mr. Wrong I married nearly eleven years ago.

  When Patrick died after living only four days, Greg didn’t have to tell me that he was relieved. I could see it. It meant that he wouldn’t be saddled with a child who needed constant care.

  We didn’t really talk about it. There wasn’t much to say. He told me that the job he was offered in California was too good to pass up.

  I said, “Don’t let me keep you.”

  And that was that.

  All these thoughts did nothing but depress me further, so I went to bed early, determined to clear my head and make a fresh start the next day.

  I was awakened at seven in the morning by a phone call from Sam. “Carley, turn on the television. There’s a news bulletin. Lynn Spencer went up to her house in Bedford last night. Somebody torched it. The fire department managed to get her out, but she inhaled a lot of smoke. She’s in St. Ann’s Hospital in serious condition.”

  As Sam hung up, I grabbed the remote from the bedside table. The phone rang just as I clicked the TV on. It was the office of St. Ann’s Hospital. “Ms. DeCarlo, your stepsister, Lynn Spencer, is a patient here. She very much wants to see you. Will you be able to visit her today?” The woman’s voice became urgent. “She’s terribly upset and in quite a bit of pain. It’s very important to her that you come.”

  TWO

  On the forty-minute drive to St. Ann’s Hospital I kept tuned to the CBS station to catch a
nything new that was being said about the fire. According to the reports, Lynn Spencer had driven to her home in Bedford around eleven o’clock last night. The housekeepers, a couple, Manuel and Rosa Gomez, live in a separate residence on the estate. They apparently were not expecting her to be there that evening and were not aware that she was in the main house.

  What made Lynn decide to go to Bedford last night? I wondered as I decided to risk the Cross Bronx Expressway, the fastest way to get from the east side of Manhattan to Westchester County if there isn’t an accident to snarl traffic. The problem is there usually is an accident, causing the Cross Bronx to be called the worst roadway in the country.

  The Spencers’ New York apartment is on Fifth Avenue, near the building in which Jackie Kennedy had lived. I thought of my nine hundred square feet of domain and the $25,000 I’d lost, the money that was to be a deposit on a co-op. I thought of the guy at the meeting yesterday whose child was dying and who was going to lose his home because he’d invested in Gen-stone. I wondered if Lynn felt a shred of guilt going back to that opulent apartment after the meeting. I wondered if she was planning to talk about that to me.

  April had returned to being April. When I walked the three blocks to the garage where I park my car, I sniffed the air and appreciated being alive. The sun was shining and the sky was intensely blue. The few clouds overhead were like puffs of white cushions, drifting around up there almost as an afterthought. That’s the way my interior designer friend, Eve, tells me she uses throw pillows when she decorates a room. The pillows should look casual, an afterthought when everything else is in place.

  The thermometer on the dashboard registered 62 degrees. It would be a terrific day for a drive to the country if the reason for the drive wasn’t the one I had. Still, I was curious. I was on my way to visit a stepsister who was virtually a stranger and who, for some unknown reason, had sent for me instead of one of her celebrity friends when she was rushed to the hospital.

  I actually got across the Cross Bronx in about fifteen minutes, a near record, and turned north toward the Hutchinson River Parkway. The newscaster began updating the story about Lynn. At 3:15 A.M. the fire alarm in the Bedford mansion had gone off. When the firefighters got there a few minutes later, the entire downstairs of the house was engulfed in flames. Rosa Gomez assured them there was no one inside. Fortunately, one of the firemen recognized the Fiat in the garage as the car Lynn always drove and asked Rosa how long it had been there. At her shocked response, they put a ladder up to the bedroom she pointed out, broke a window, and got in. They found a dazed and disoriented Lynn trying to grope her way through the dense smoke. By then she was suffering from smoke inhalation. Her feet were blistered from the heat of the floor, and her hands suffered second-degree burns because she had been feeling along the wall searching for the door. The hospital reported that her condition had been upgraded from guarded to stable.

  A preliminary report indicated that the fire was arson. Gasoline had been sprayed over the front porch that ran the entire front of the residence. When ignited, it resulted in a fireball that within seconds engulfed the downstairs floor in flames.

  Who would set the house on fire? I wondered. Did anyone know or suspect that Lynn was there? My mind immediately raced to the stockholders’ meeting and the man who had shouted at her. He had specifically referred to her Bedford mansion. I was sure that when the police heard about him, he’d be paid a visit.

  * * *

  Lynn was in a cubicle in a special care section of St. Ann’s Hospital. There were oxygen tubes in her nostrils, and her arms were bandaged. Her complexion, however, wasn’t nearly as pale as it had been yesterday when I saw her at the stockholders’ meeting. Then I remembered that smoke inhalation can give the skin a pinkish glow.

  Her blond hair was brushed back and seemed limp, even ragged. I wondered if they’d had to cut off some of it in the emergency room. Her palms were bandaged, but the tops of her fingers were bare. I was ashamed that for a moment I wondered if the solitaire diamond she’d been flashing at the meeting was somewhere in the burned-out house.

  Her eyes were closed, and I wasn’t sure if she was asleep. I looked at the nurse who had brought me to her. “She was awake a minute ago,” she said quietly. “Talk to her.”

  “Lynn,” I said uncertainly.

  She opened her eyes. “Carley.” She tried to smile. “Thank you for coming.”

  I nodded. I’m not usually tongue-tied, but I simply didn’t know what to say to her. I was sincerely thankful that she hadn’t been severely burned or suffocated in the fire, but I couldn’t imagine why I was playing next of kin. If there’s one thing I’m sure of in this world, it’s that Lynn Hamilton Spencer has as little regard for me as I have for her.

  “Carley . . .” Her voice rose in pitch, and realizing it, she closed her lips. “Carley,” she began again, her tone quieter, “I had no idea that Nick was taking money from the company. I still can’t believe it. I don’t know anything about the business part of his life. Carley, he owned the house in Bedford and the apartment in New York before we were married.”

  Her lips were cracked and dry. She lifted her right hand. I knew she intended to reach for the water glass, and I picked it up and held it for her. The nurse had left as soon as Lynn opened her eyes. I wasn’t sure if I should push the button that would raise the bed. Instead, I slipped my arm around her neck and supported her while she sipped.

  She drank only a little, then leaned back and closed her eyes as though that brief effort had drained her. It was then that I felt a wrench of genuine pity for her. There was something hurt and broken about her. The exquisitely dressed and coiffed Lynn I had met in Boca Raton was light-years from this vulnerable woman who needed help in drinking a few drops of water.

  I laid her back on the pillow, and tears slid down her cheeks. “Carley,” she said, her voice tired and spent, “I’ve lost everything. Nick is dead. I’ve been asked to resign from the PR firm. I introduced Nick to a lot of new customers. More than half of them invested heavily in the company. The same thing happened in Southhampton at the club. People who were my friends for years are furious that because of me they met Nick, and now have lost lots of money.”

  I thought of how Sam had described Nick as a snake oil salesman.

  “The lawyers for the stockholders are going to file suit against me.” In her urgency, Lynn had begun speaking rapidly. She put her hand on my arm and then winced and bit her lip. I’m sure the contact sent a shot of pain through her blistered palm. “I have some money in my personal bank account,” she said, “and that’s it. Soon I won’t have a home. I don’t have a job anymore. Carley, I need your help.”

  How could I possibly help her? I wondered. I didn’t know what to say, so I just looked at her.

  “If Nick did take that money, my only hope is that people will believe I’m an innocent victim, too. Carley, there’s talk of indicting me. Please don’t let that happen. People respect you. They’ll listen to you. Make them understand that if there was deception, I had no part in it.”

  “Do you believe Nick is dead?” It was a question I had to ask.

  “Yes, I do. I know that Nick absolutely believed in the legitimacy of Gen-stone. He was on his way to a business meeting in Puerto Rico, and he got caught in a freak storm.”

  Now her voice was becoming strained and her eyes filled with tears. “Nick liked you, Carley. He liked you so much. He admired you. He told me about your baby. Nick’s son, Jack, just turned ten. His grandparents live in Greenwich. Now they won’t even let me see him. They never liked me because I looked like their daughter, and I’m alive and she’s dead. I miss Jack. I want to be able to at least visit him.”

  That I could understand. “Lynn, I’m sorry, truly sorry.”

  “Carley, I need more than your sympathy. I need you to help people realize that I was not part of any scheme to defraud them. Nick said he could tell that you were a stand-up person. Will you be a stand-up person for me?” She c
losed her eyes. “And for him,” she whispered. “He liked you a lot.”

  THREE

  Ned sat in the hospital lobby, a newspaper open in front of him. He had come up the walk closely behind a woman carrying flowers, and he hoped that anyone watching would believe they were together. Once inside, he’d taken a seat in the lobby.

  He slouched down so that the newspaper shielded his face. Everything was happening so fast. He needed to think.

  Yesterday he had almost lunged at Spencer’s wife when she grabbed the microphone at the stockholders’ meeting to say that she was sure it was all an accounting mistake. He was lucky the other guy had started shouting at her.

  But then when they were outside the hotel and he saw her get into a shiny limousine, rage had exploded inside him.

  He had immediately hailed a cab and had given the driver the address of her New York apartment, that swanky building across the street from Central Park. He’d arrived just as the doorman was holding open the door for her to go inside.

  As he paid off the cab and got out, he imagined Lynn Spencer going up in the elevator to the swanky place that had been bought with the money she and her husband stole from him.

  He’d resisted the urge to rush after her and started walking down Fifth Avenue. All along the way he saw contempt in the eyes of the people coming toward him. They knew he didn’t belong on Fifth Avenue. He belonged in a world where people bought only the things they absolutely needed, paying for them with credit cards and then making only the smallest monthly payment they could get away with.

  On TV Spencer had talked about how anyone who had invested in IBM or Xerox fifty years ago became millionaires. “You’ll not only be helping others by buying Gen-stone, but you’ll make a fortune.” Liar! Liar! Liar!—the word exploded in Ned’s mind.

  From Fifth Avenue he walked to where he could get the bus home to Yonkers. The house there was an old two-story frame. He and Annie had rented the bottom floor twenty years ago when they were first married.