She tucked her hand through my arm and hugged me to her, dragging me along to get away from the congestion. I enjoyed the contact, so I didn't pull away.

  "While we're on the subject," I said, "what brings you here? What you said about me goes for you too. Your beat's not the financial beat, is it?"

  "I got sent out on this because it's a little hotter than a simple merger or a take-over postponed because of sudden death. A lawyer for Whente Corporation came out with a public statement this afternoon claiming it was Harold Chaney's intention to sign the papers assigning his shares to them. They already have a signed letter of intent and they're saying that, in Chaney's sudden absence, that stands as a legal agreement. Lewis Warden, as acting CEO, and Florence Chaney, as Chairman of the Board, pro tem, says otherwise."

  "Run that train through the station one more time, will you?" I said.

  "What's your confusion?"

  "Are you telling me that Harold Chaney was welcoming the take-over with open arms and it was the wife and partner who didn't want it?"

  "That's the way it looks. It also looks like it's boiling up into a fight between Whente and Florence Chaney, now that Harold's gone and she has the voting power of his shares."

  "Nobody knows that for sure, do they?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "Nobody knows that Chaney left those shares to his wife, do they? The will hasn't been probated or even read, has it?"

  "I just assumed," Karen said.

  "That a man'd leave something like that to his wife?"

  "Well, yes."

  "He had plenty of other things. With or without the shares, I'm sure Florence Chaney's still a wealthy woman."

  Karen looked thoughtful.

  "Well," she finally said, "it's something to think about, though I can't figure out what it means right this minute."

  "You'll have to excuse me," I said, disengaging her hand from my sleeve. "I've got some things to do inside."

  She wouldn't stay disengaged but grabbed onto my arm with both hands; smiled sweetly, and said,"You'll look a lot less conspicuous with a wife on your arm, Jake."

  "Wife? Well, for Lord's sake, you're young enough to be my daughter."

  "That's true," she said, moving me along and matching me stride for stride, her hip riding along with mine like a matched pair of high-steppers, "but twenty years' difference never counted for much between a man and a woman. In fact, there are some working it the other way around. Older women marrying younger men."

  She'd worked us through the crowd outside the front door right up onto the porch, then backed off half a step to let me take the lead. I was stopped at the door by a young man in gray pants and a maroon sports jacket with a black and gold coat of arms embroidered on the pocket and a permanent band of black satin sewn around the right sleeve.

  "Family and invited guests only," he whispered. "I'm sorry."

  "Has the service started?" I whispered back.

  "Not for another fifteen minutes," he murmured.

  "This lady has to use the facility downstairs, next to the smoking room," I murmured back, showing him that I was familiar with the layout of his establishment. "She's pregnant and in some distress."

  The youngster's eyes went to Karen's middle, but her coat didn't let him see much. He dithered a minute, then stepped aside and let us go through, me holding onto her elbow like she was fragile and Karen trying to keep from busting out laughing.

  The crowd was thinner inside.

  I put my ear up close to Karen's. Her hair smelled sweet.

  "Maybe it's not such a bad idea you go downstairs and sit in the lounge."

  "No, you don't," she said. "Where you go, I go."

  "I'm going to try and talk to Harold Chaney's daughter. I can't do it inside while the service is about to start. I'm going to get her out of there and down stairs where it's quieter if I can."

  "Don't try to trick me, Jake. I can help you question her. The woman's touch, you know."

  "Hush. Go do like I ask you to do."

  She surprised me by turning away and going to the stairs, which was just as well because the kid with the mourning band on his sleeve was keeping an eye on us.

  I went up to the open doors of the slumber room where another Adams-Winterfield employee stood guard. I didn't say a word, just flipped my badge at him and pantomimed that I was just going to stand in the back and make myself invisible.

  He wanted to take it farther but he didn't. Whenever you're around funeral homes you can work on the assumption that the closer you get to the coffin the less likely the undertakers will do anything that might make a scene.

  I stood in the back for about a minute or two, getting the lay of things.

  Not every seat was taken, so I judged I was well ahead of time for the memorial ceremony. There was an aisle on each side and one in the center. The stage where the coffin with the photograph on its lid stood took up half of the front of the room. A small grouping of chairs off to the right was for the use of the family.

  Sometimes the family is secluded in privacy behind a screen, but Florence Chaney, or whoever else made the decision, had done away with that and they were all out there for everyone to see.

  I saw the old lady and her nurse-companion, Maddy, sitting side by side, their chairs moved away far enough to separate them from the others spiritually if not physically.

  Just across the space sat Chaney's daughter, close enough to reach out and take her grandmother's hand, which she did just that minute. Florence Chaney was sitting next to her stepdaughter, with the stepson on the other side.

  Milton Banner and Lewis Warden sat in the second row with one other person and an empty seat. The three chairs in the third row were filled with people I didn't know.

  I felt somebody's eyes on me. When I looked I saw Marcus Sears looking at me. He was sitting on the center aisle, dressed for the funeral in a black coat, gray vest, and black tie. His hands were resting on his walking stick, holding on to a pair of gray gloves and a black homburg. All of a sudden he didn't look like a financial mover and shaker but like a bit player in a drawing-room comedy, waiting for the curtain to fall so he could go home and soak his feet. He raised an eyebrow at me, asking me what I was doing there, and I turned my eyes to the family group then back to him. He raised his left hand a little and I shook my head, telling him that I wasn't interested in the old lady and her nurse who sat apart. He held up one finger and I nodded. The person I wanted to speak to was in the first row. He raised his left hand slightly again, signing that he'd start counting from the left. I nodded right away on one. He got up, turned and placed his hat and gloves on the chair, and went over to the family group.

  I could tell he'd already presented himself once and delivered his condolences. Both Florence Chaney and Lewis Warden leaned forward as though they thought he wanted to speak to one of them, but he smiled them away and leaned in close to whisper to the bereaved daughter. She looked a little uncertain about what he was saying, but it was clear she was brought up to respect important elders and followed him up the aisle without more than a second's hesitation.

  I backed out of the slumber room, but before I went across the reception hall and down the stairs, asked the undertaker's assistant how I'd know when the memorial was about to start.

  "If you're going downstairs for a smoke you'll hear three organ chords," he said.

  Just like dimming the lights at the theater, I thought before I went on along down to the lounge.

  Karen was the only one sitting in the smoking room but she wasn't smoking. She stood up when Sears and the girl walked in.

  "Jessica, this is Mr. Jake Hatch," Sears said. "Mr. Hatch, this is Jessica Chaney, Harold's daughter."

  According to what I'd been told, Jessica would have to be twenty-one or twenty-two, but she had the fragile look and the manner of a girl of fifteen or sixteen. I could see she was very puzzled about why Sears had plucked her out of the slumber room and marched her down the aisle for everybody to see, down here to be confronted by a rumpled-looking man and a competent-looking young woman.

  I introduced Karen around and a little frown appeared between my friend Sears's eyebrows,

  "Don't I know you, Miss Olliphant? You look familiar. Of course. I've seen you on the television news at times when business has taken me to Denver." He turned his frown to me. "I don't know, Jake."

  "Karen and me got a deal, Marcus. We help each other out and we respect the confidence of whatever one tells the other isn't for publication."

  "All right then."

  "Will you tell me what's going on, Mr. Sears?" Jessica said in a soft, childish voice, which had little bits of iron filings buried in it.

  For all her passive ways and under-the-lashes glances, soft voice, and small gloved hands, Jessica wasn't a young woman without spirit or resources.

  "Mr. Hatch is a detective for the Burlington Northern Railroad."

  "Oh yes, Florence mentioned you to us."

  "That's good," I said. "Everything's very straight forward here. I want you to know that. Will you sit down for a minute?"

  "The ceremony's going to start soon," she said.

  "Not for a little while yet. We've got time. Please, sit down and let me ask you a few questions. It won't take very long."

  Sears touched her elbow, and that was enough to make her defer to him and do as I'd asked her to do. She sat down facing the door to the hall. I sat down next to her. Sears took a seat a few chairs away like he didn't want to eavesdrop on a private conversation, though he could probably hear perfectly well as long as we didn't lean close and whisper.

  She wouldn't let him get away with it. She turned to him and in a low voice said, "What is your interest in arranging this interview between us, Mr. Sears?"

  "You know and understand my position at the Board of Trade?"

  "Of course."

  "Then you must know that since your father's death there's some confusion about what his position had been concerning the impending take-over of Chaney Enterprises by the Whente Corporation. Anything that upsets the calm and open conduct of business is of some concern to me."

  "Yes, I understand."

  She removed her gloves as she glanced up at Karen, who was still standing. Karen sat down in a chair across the room, next to the doorway that led out into a hall that served the restrooms too.

  Jessica's hands were small and well-shaped. She spent a lot of time working wit them, because they were brown and strong, the right hand smudged with ingrained dirt around the crotch of the thumb. Not the kind of hands for fancy rings.

  She looked at me with gray eyes that had those same little iron filings in them. "I have no idea how I can enlighten you on that matter any more than half a dozen others might do."

  "I understand that. But we've been getting conflicting reports on how your father felt about the takeover. Most say he was ready to fight it. A couple say he welcomed it. I thought he might've talked to you or your brother, since it was your future he was dealing with as much as his."

  "My father wasn't the sort to discuss his plans—even the plans he had for others—with anyone, least of all the people who would be most affected by his decisions."

  "Why do you think that was?"

  She looked at me as though she didn't think I was very bright.

  "Because my father saw himself as the patriarch."

  "Not a stern man? Not strict or mean?"

  She waved her stained right hand in front of her face. "No, no. Permissive. Indulgent. In anything but the management of finances. In that area he not only believed that he knew best, he believed that he was the only one that knew anything at all."

  "So he would've just gone ahead and arranged secure financial futures for his mother, his wife, and his children without discussion or consultation?"

  "That's correct."

  "And he didn't discuss the take-over with you or your brother?"

  "Never directly with me. You might ask Mark if he spoke to him about it, but I doubt it, since Mark would have mentioned it to me. But for what it may be worth to you"—she turned her head to look at Marcus Sears again—"I had the impression that my father welcomed the offer."

  "Why do you think that was? He was still pretty young for retirement—a dynamo like your father."

  "He wanted a new life," she said, suddenly looking at me with a frankness that told me she'd made up her mind about something while we'd been talking and was ready to tell me the truth about anything I wanted to ask. But I also could see this strong loyalty to family and the tradition of confidentiality that people with money seem to develop more than most. Whatever I was going to get I was going to have to dig for, she wasn't going to dump it in my lap.

  I knew how to play that game. It was like fly fishing. You just kept on pulling the lure back and dapping it out again, choosing a different spot each time, until all of a sudden the fish came leaping up out of the shadows and took the bait. Then you could just reel it in.

  I thought of Bess's two questions.

  "You remember when your stepmother went on the mountain-climbing expedition?"

  "I went along with her," Jessica said. "Just you and her?"

  "Oh no, there was a party of people. There were twelve of us in all, plus two guides."

  "I meant were you and your stepmother strangers to the rest of the group, or did friends go along?"

  "My Uncle Milton went along, but he refused to climb. Not even the lower slopes. He just stayed in the lodge and drank and made sketches of the cloud formations."

  "I didn't know that your uncle and your stepmother were that friendly."

  "How friendly do you mean?"

  "Friendly enough to spend that much time together in a small group of people on the edge of nowhere."

  "My father treated him to the vacation. He thought it would do Uncle Milton some good."

  "So your father decided things for people besides financial matters?"

  "Occasionally. Milton was a special case. Nobody knows what to do about Uncle Milton. I don't know what was in my father's mind, sending him off to climb mountains. I don't know what he expected to happen."

  "Was there anyone else you knew on the expedition?"

  "Mr. Pickering and his wife."

  "Terrence Pickering?"

  "That's right," she said, looking at me in some surprise, as though it would be pretty remarkable for anyone to know so many Pickerings that they'd have to be identified by first names.

  "I thought he was a business rival of your father's."

  "Florence and Sheila Pickering, Terry's wife, were friends."

  "Good friends?"

  "No, just social." She smiled briefly. "We're all very civilized. We don't let differences in one arena interfere with intercourse in another."

  I didn't know if the smile was a little sardonic—if she was enjoying a private joke and speaking with double meanings—or if she was giving me a clue.

  "Mrs. Chaney says she never made the climb for the summit," I went on.

  "No. It was decided she didn't have the strength for it."

  "Did you make the climb?"

  "Yes."

  "But not your Uncle Milton."

  "That's right."

  "Anybody else not make the climb?" She hesitated a second.

  "Mr. Pickering turned his ankle on the lower slopes and decided against it."

  There was a flush on Jessica's cheeks and neck, as though she was excited by hinting to a stranger that her stepmother had perhaps had a little go-round with a man her father didn't like.

  "Do you remember if one or more of the guides or porters may have been North American Indians?"

  "I didn't have much conversation with the men hired to take us on the climb."

  It'd just been a long cast.

  Someone came tapping along the tiled corridor. A woman passed by wearing a mink coat with the collar up and a hat to match. She was crying and had a handkerchief up to her mouth, so all I could see was part of a face and a flash of red hair.

  She sensed our eyes on her and paused for a beat, looking into the room with a sweeping glance and then fixing on Jessica.

  I looked at the girl. Her hands were still, balled up in little fists. The splinters of iron in her eyes had turned to knives.

  The woman gasped and hurried on.

  "Who's that?" I asked, quick and sharp.

  "I don't know," Jessica stammered. "I thought it was someone who used to work for my father a long time ago."

  "Who would that be?"

  "Marla Kassabian." She collected herself. "But that wasn't her."

  Then the first chord of the organ warned us that the memorial was about to begin.

  TWENTY

  AFTER THAT FIRST ORGAN CHORD, Jessica stood up without a word and went upstairs with Marcus Sears, trying to catch up so it could be seen he was escorting her back.

  At the door he paused long enough to tell me with a gesture of his hand that he wanted to know anything I might find out about the crying woman, having read about as much from her response to Jessica's look of hate as I'd done.

  Karen's eyes had been elsewhere or something, because, though she knew something had happened, she didn't know what.

  "You learn anything, Jake?" she asked.

  "You see Jessica's hands?"

  "What about them?"

  "You tell me."

  "They were smudged with soot or something."

  "All around the curve of her thumb and forefinger?"

  "That's right."

  "Gunpowder. I didn't have to ask, but if I did ask was she a marksman you can bet she'd say she was. It takes a lot of shooting to stain somebody's hand that way."

  "You're not saying she shot her father?"

  "I'm just saying there's a hell of a lot of people fooling around with guns and rifles in this situation."

  "Do you think this Terrence Pickering is going to turn out to be a rifleman too?"

 

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