“Do you pry so deeply into the backgrounds of all the men you meet?”
“All the ones I sleep with,” she said, “before I sleep with them.”
“And have you turned up any cads?”
“One cashiered army officer who embezzled his regiment’s funds,” she said. “One self-styled entrepreneur who turned out to be a bookmaker, haunting the tracks every day, and one murderer.”
“Tell me about the murderer,” Stone said.
“I had been seeing him for about a year,” she said. “I had just turned thirty and had been promoted to a position in my service that gave me access to a great deal of information. There was talk of marriage. He inherited quite a lot of money and a fine country property from his elder brother, who had died in a farming accident, and he proposed. I vetted him and found that he had been a suspect in the death of an elderly aunt in Scotland, and I brought that to the attention of the police. A few days later two detectives arrived at a restaurant where we were dining and took him away, charging him with his brother’s murder. It was revealed at the trial that he had driven a tractor over the poor fellow and then harrowed him. Tried to make it look like he’d fallen off the machine and under the harrow.”
“And you turned him in?”
“Most certainly,” she replied. “I am an upstanding subject of Her Majesty and an upholder of the law. If he’d been acquitted,” she added, “I’d have married him. As it was, he got life.”
Stone’s cell phone buzzed at his belt. He looked at it and saw Dino was calling. “Excuse me,” he said, and answered it.
“Hello, Dino.”
“Where the hell are you?” Dino asked.
“It’s a secret.”
“I can find out, you know; I’m a detective.”
“Far, far away,” Stone said.
“Well, you’d better get your ass back here,” Dino replied.
“Why?”
“Because your esteemed client, Mr. Herbert Fisher, has been arrested for the murder of his girlfriend, one Sheila Seidman. My guys say he tossed her off his penthouse; she made a mess on Park Avenue.”
“I don’t believe it,” Stone said.
“I don’t know why not,” Dino replied. “If she’d been my girlfriend I’d have offed her a long time ago. Anyway, Herbie’s back in the tank, and he won’t talk to anybody but you. What time will you be here?”
“I’m in Maine, Dino; it’ll have to be tomorrow.”
“Stay another week, for all I care. I just wanted to give you the message.”
“Tell Herbie tomorrow afternoon,” Stone said.
“Okey dokey,” Dino replied. “Felicity with you?”
“That information is classified,” Stone said.
“That means she’s with you. It wouldn’t be classified, if she weren’t.”
“You’re too smart for me, Dino.”
“I always was,” Dino replied and then hung up.
Stone put the phone back in its holster.
“So what difficulty has Mr. Fisher got himself into now?” Felicity asked.
“Apparently, Herbie’s girlfriend, an unbearable woman named Sheila, a prostitute by trade, has taken a dive from the terrace of his new penthouse, and the squad at the Nineteenth like Herbie for it. I have to go back tomorrow morning and deal with the situation, Herbie having paid me a large retainer to look after him.”