William Lashner - Bitter Truth

“We take a keen interest in all of our clients’ affairs,” said the blond man.

“How wonderfully Orwellian. Is there anything about Miss Shaw’s situation we should know?”

The blond man stared at me for a moment. “No. Nothing at all. I hope we can be of further service sometime, Mr. Carl.”

“I’m sure you do,” I said, certain he never wanted to hear from me again.

James, the young concierge, was waiting at the door for us after we left the desk. As soon as we came near he swung the glass door open. “Good day,” he said with a nod and a smile.

Beth was already through when I stopped in the door frame. Without turning around, I said, “Thank you, James. By the way, that man standing behind Mr. Jeffries, staring at me with a peculiar distaste right now. Who is he?”

“Oh, that’s Mr. Harrington. He is in the trust and estates department,” said James.

“With a face like that I bet he’s got a load of old lady clients.”

“No sir, just the one keeps him busy enough.”

“One?” I turned around in surprise. As I had expected, Harrington was still staring bullets at me.

“The Reddmans, sir. He manages the entire Reddman estate.”

“Of the Reddman Pickle Reddmans?”

“Exactly, sir,” said James as he urged me out the entranceway.

“The Reddmans,” I said. “Imagine that.”

“Thank you for banking at First Mercantile,” said James, just before I heard the click of the glass door’s lock behind me.

DRIVING BACK INTO TOWNon the Schuylkill Expressway I wasn’t fighting my way through the left lanes. I stayed, instead, in the safe slow right and let the buzz of the aggressive traffic slide by. When a white convertible elbowed into my lane, inches from my bumper, as it sped to pass a truck in the center, I didn’t so much as tap my horn. I was too busy thinking. One woman was dead, from suicide or murder, I wasn’t sure yet which, another was paying me ten thousand dollars to find out, and now, most surprisingly, they both seemed to be Reddmans.

We all know Reddman Foods, we’ve been consuming its pressure-flavored pickles since we were kids – sweet pickles, sour pickles, kosher dill pickles, fine pickled gherkins. The green and red pickle jar with the founder’s stern picture above the name is an icon and the Reddman Pickle has taken its place in the pantheon of American products, alongside Heinz Ketchup and Kellogg’s cereal and the Ford motor car and Campbell ’s soup. The brand names become trademarks, so we forget that there are families behind the names, families whose wealth grows ever more obscene whenever we throw ketchup on the burger, shake out a bowl of cereal, buy ourselves a fragrant new automobile. Or snap a garlic pickle between our teeth. And like Henry Ford and Henry John Heinz and Andrew Carnegie, Claudius Reddman was one of the great men of America ’s industrial past, earning his fortune in business and his reputation in philanthropy. The Reddman Library at the University of Pennsylvania. The Reddman Wing of the Philadelphia Art Museum. The Reddman Foundation with its prestigious and lucrative Claudius Reddman grants for the most accomplished artists and writers and scholars.

So, it was a Reddman who had pointed a gun at me and then begged me for help, an heir to the great pickle fortune. Why hadn’t she told me? Why had she wanted me to think her only a poverty-struck little liar? Well, maybe she was a little liar, but a liar with money was something else again. And I did like that smile.

“What would you do if you were suddenly stinkingly rich?” I asked Beth.

“I don’t know, it never crossed my mind.”

“Liar,” I said. “Of course it crossed your mind. It crosses every American mind. It is our joint national fantasy, the communal American wishing for a fortune that is the very engine of our economic growth.”

“Well, when the lottery was at sixty-six million I admit I bought a ticket.”

“Only one?”

“All right, ten.”

“And what would you have done with all that money?”

“I sort of fantasized about starting a foundation to help public interest law organizations.”

“That’s noble and pathetic, both.”

“And I thought a Porsche would be nice.”

“Better,” I said. “You’d look good in a Porsche.”

“I think so, yes. What about you, Victor? You’ve thought about this, I suppose.”

“Some.” A radical understatement. Whole afternoons had been plundered in my fervent imaginings of great wealth acquired and spent.

“So what would you do?”

“The first thing I’d do,” I said, “is quit.”

“You’d leave the firm?”

“I’d leave the law, I’d leave the city, I’d leave my life. I’d cocoon somewhere hot and thick with coconuts and return as something else completely. I always thought I’d like to paint.”

“I didn’t know you had any talent.”

“I have none whatsoever,” I said cheerfully. “But isn’t that the point? If I had talent I’d be a slave to it, concerned about producing my oh so important work. Thankfully, I am completely talentless. Maybe I’d go to Long Island and wear Gap khakis and throw paint on canvas like Jackson Pollock and drink like a fish every afternoon.”

“You don’t drink well.”

“You’re right, and I’ve never been to Long Island, but the image is nice. And did I mention the Ferrari? I’d like an F355 Spider in candy-apple red. I hear the babes, they love the Ferrari. Oh hell, who knows, I’d probably be miserable even so, but at least I wouldn’t be a lawyer.”

“Do you really hate it that much?”

“You see the law as a noble pursuit, as a way to right wrongs. I see it as a somewhat distasteful job that I’m shackled to by my monthly credit card bills. And if I don’t get out, and soon,” I said, without a hint of humor in my voice, “it’s going to kill me.”

The car in front of me flashed its rear red lights and the car beside me slowed and I braked to a stop and soon we were just sitting there, all of us, hundreds and hundreds of us, parked in the largest parking lot in the city. The Schuylkill did this every now and then, just stopped, for no apparent reason, as if the King of Commuting, in his headquarters in King of Prussia, simply flicked a switch and turned the highway off. We sat quietly for a few minutes before the horns began. Is there anything so futile in a traffic jam as a horn? Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t know you were in such a hurry, in that case maybe I’ll just ram the car in front of me .

“I’d like to travel,” said Beth. “That’s what I would do if I suddenly had too much money.”

She had been thinking about it the whole time we had been stuck and that surprised me. For me to mull over all I would do with all the money I wanted was as natural as breathing, but it was not so natural for Beth. Generally she evinced great satisfaction with her life as it was. This was my first indication ever that her satisfaction was waning.

“I never saw the point of traveling,” I said. “There’s only so many museums you can rush through, so many old churches, until you’re sick of it all.”

“I’m not talking for just a week to see some museums,” said Beth. “I’m talking about taking a few years off and seeing the world.” I turned and looked at her. She was staring forward, as if from the prow of a swift ocean liner instead of through the windshield of a car stalled in traffic. “I always thought, as a girl, that there was something out there waiting for me and my purpose in life was to go out and find it. If there is a disappointment in my life it’s that I haven’t even really searched. I feel like I’ve been tromping around looking for it in Philadelphia only because the light is better here, when all along I know it’s someplace else.”