Martha Grimes: The Grave Maurice

“How about-?” Again she squinted at him, as if finding him harder to believe than a saint’s vision. “Excuse me, but that’s just what I’ve spent the lunch hour explaining.”

“No, no. What I mean is, why not just go back?” Vernon looked over his shoulder. “Back along this pavement you’re already on. There’s a coffee bar a few doors back and I’d be happy to buy us an espresso or latte‘.”

She considered. “I hate those drinks. But I could do with some regular coffee.”

“Let’s go.”

They sat at the counter drinking plain coffee, hers with (he counted) five sugars, and Vernon asked Daphne where she lived. “Disneyland?”

“Clapham. Same thing.”

“Where do you work?”

“Nowhere. You know that ‘resting between plays’ that actors do? I’m resting between tending bar in the George and clerking at Debenham’s.”

“Do you know anything about the stock market at all?”

“Of course. My portfolio’s split fifteen different ways.”

“Is it the poor-little-matchstick-girl life you lead that makes you so sarcastic?”

Daphne appeared to like that image; she laughed the way some people sneeze, an ah-ha-ah-ha-ah-ha that segued into a brief explosion.

“The reason I ask is that I might be able to use you.”

“I doubt it.” She drank her coffee and stared at the phony turn-of-the-century signs.

Vernon ignored this reply. “If you have, say, a head for numbers?” Only, looking at the head with its two little ears, he doubted it.

She was holding her cup with both hands, frowning slightly. “Actually, I’m good with that. I took a first in maths at university.”

“Which one?”

“Oxford.”

Vernon’s eyebrows shot nearly up to his hairline. “Oxford? You?”

She turned her head to give him her signature squint. “Do you think I’m dumb just because my cap has ears?”

Vernon offered her a job on the spot. On the spot, she declined.

Finally, he talked her around to coming to work for him, aware that she could be a disaster, and she would probably try to sell his shares of British Telecom if the market took a tiny dip. But he found her caustic sense of humor bracing. And he couldn’t resist that damned cap.

Bobby, now, was a whole different thing.

Bobby (who might also be anywhere from twelve to thirty-two) ran into him on a skateboard. Bobby said he was “messengering” a document to someone in Vernon’s building. (He held up a manila envelope as if it were proof of legitimacy.) He’d knocked Vernon down in the lobby, given him a hand up and rattled off a stream of apologies. An apology dialectic, you could say, laying the groundwork for future apologies, if need be.

“You belong to a messenger service that uses skateboards?”

“No. But my bike got in an accident and I’ll use this until it’s fixed. Don’t tell them.”

“Me? They could put hot pokers in my eyes and I’d never tell.”

Then Bobby asked him what firm he worked at. When Vernon told him it was his own investment firm, Bobby asked him to recommend a good hedge fund and what did he think about this new company Sea ’n’ Sand?

“How do you even know about Sea ’n’ Sand?” This was a brand-new travel business dealing exclusively in cruises and coastal vacations. Why it was becoming so popular Vernon put down to a masterly PR and ad department because it offered nothing new by way of destinations or service.

Bobby shrugged. “Same way as you do, I guess. I think it’ll tank, myself.”

And Bobby went on. He pointed out to Vernon that the Dow was really no barometer; it didn’t call any shots. It was too heavy with industrials. “I mean, where’s Yahoo!? Where’s Macintosh? Where’s any of the high techs?” Bobby was a day trader who “always checked the financials. Always.” He paid no attention to financial gurus such as Hortense Stud (her name arming her competitors with endless sobriquets), who, he said, was a Michelin tire with a serious leak.

While the news in the manila envelope grew whiskers, Bobby talked. He asked Vernon what he thought about SayAgain, a purportedly hot new firm in the cellular war that was marketing phones for the almost-deaf. It was supposed to merge with CallBack-“You know about that, don’t you? Even hush-hush as it is?” Not only did Vernon not know about it, he wished to hell he’d thought of it. Damn. Bobby said he was going to short the stock if the merger took place because a little down the road Call-Back’s image manipulators were going to have trouble with ads picturing old geezers plying these phones. “Remember,” said Bobby, “Planet Hollywood?” And he set his hand on a downward spiral.

“Bummer,” said Vernon.

Bobby, clutching his skateboard and envelope, just went on and on. He was every bit as bad as Vernon on the day Vernon had met Daphne. So Vernon offered him a job on the spot. Unlike Daphne, Bobby accepted on the spot.

Vernon could easily have supplied each of them with an office, but they insisted on staying together. He called her Daffy; she called him Booby. They argued about everything-penny stocks, IPOs, short selling. Actually, they brawled a lot of the time. So what? Vernon said to Samantha. Let them brawl; they’re brilliant.

And they, in turn, thought Vernon walked on water. He had saved them from running people down on skateboards and standing indefinitely on street corners.

Vernon lived alone in a penthouse condo overlooking the Thames with white walls and three fireplaces, filled with angular, streamlined furniture by Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe and other seriously Swedish or German designers. He had never married. He was thirty-six years old. He did enjoy the company of women, two of them, one named Janet, a good-looking brunette who thought marriage for them was in the cards or the stars. Why she thought this he couldn’t imagine as he had never suggested it and never would. The other woman was a high-class whore named Taffy, whom he actually preferred to Janet, certainly on the sexual front-as well he should, when he was paying five hundred quid for two hours of her time. Taffy looked like her name-smooth and golden-tasted like it, stretched like it. She was inventive (but then, again, for that price, she ought to be).

Vernon loved his life. He loved coming home to the white walls and slick furniture, the polished floors, the aquarium he had paid thirty thousand pounds to have installed in one wall, flanked by paintings by Pollock and Hockney. His cat oversaw this arrangement. He knew Barney’s seemingly relaxed position-tail encircling torso, paws curled into chest-masked a busy mind trying to work out how he could get in there. He had found Barney wandering along by the river near the Town of Ramsgate pub. Probably the cat remembered better times, when alleys were full of dumps and jellied eels was the plate du jour. He admired cats’ self-sufficiency; they weren’t always barking at him to be let out. Barney’s “out” was the patio, where he could look at the Thames and the night. The patio was utterly glamorous and exotic. There were palm trees and hibiscus and fruit trees. He was not a gardener but he did take very good care of everything and the plants and trees flourished. He bet it was the London rain, which more often was thick mist or drizzle, so that his plants were fanned with water, not beaten with it.

Janet didn’t like cats; she felt they were sneaky. “On the contrary,” Vernon said, “they’re perfectly open about flouting rules or stealing shrimp from your plate.”

“You know what I mean.”

Actually, he didn’t. It irritated him to death that she really thought “you-know-what-I-mean” was an answer.

At this point in his evening return he always made a pitcher of Manhattans if he was feeling really Art Deco, or martinis, if he was feeling like a drink. Now he was finishing stirring their ten-to-oneness. He tapped the stirrer against the pitcher and poured the drink into a stemmed glass to which a paper-thin peel of lemon had been added. He sipped. It was cold and quick, knife-edged.