Crang Mysteries 6-Book Bundle. Jack Batten

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ soul, your Mr. Wansborough.”

      “I don’t have to fall in love with my clients to take on their problems.” “Man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.”

      Annie’s liver and my hamburger came with fried potatoes in jumbo size. They’d been hand-cut. The hamburger was thick and dripped juices. I felt like I was entering seventh heaven.

      “What was it like,” Annie asked, “returning to the scene of your former glories?”

      “Royal Ontario?” I said. “As nostalgia goes, it wasn’t a blast from the past.”

      “Truly? All that money and privilege you once knew?”

      “I always understood I had the perks on loan,” I said. “My ex-wife and her father didn’t let me forget who held the purse strings. Them.” Annie was eating the fries with her fingers.

      She said, “I never asked before, why did Cynthia leave you?”

      “Pamela,” I said. “She didn’t leave me.”

      “Pamela. Cynthia. What’s the difference? Upper-crust names. So why did Pammie split?”

      “You’re not getting the hang of this,” I said. “It’s Pamela to everyone except the girls she went to school with at Branksome Hall.”

      “They call her Pammie?”

      “They call her Pam,” I said. “She’s got a cousin named Buff and an aunt named Bun. Her mother’s Cle. Rhymes with key.”

      “What’s the clue here?” Annie said. “One-syllable names?”

      “Yeah, but they need the right ring.”

      “Not a lot of Glads and Myrts in the Branksome gang.”

      “Kate’s about as common as it gets.”

      “So,” Annie said, “why’d Pam leave?”

      “I called her Pamela.”

      “That’s because you weren’t eligible for Branksome Hall.”

      “The reason we separated,” I said, after I’d cleared my mouth of hamburger and bun and mustard, “was a mutual decision that Pamela should return to her own kind.”

      “Migawd, Crang, you make it sound like a case study in Anthropology 101.”

      “When Pamela was young, when I met her,” I said, “she had a rebellious streak.”

      “Oh, sure,” Annie said. “Voted NDP once and married outside her class.”

      “You’re the one who started this conversation,” I said. “You want to hear it out?”

      “Sorry,” Annie said. “I promise to use my mouth henceforth for nothing except chewing liver and sipping wine. Both are divine, by the way.”

      I said, “Everybody else in Pamela’s group was hooking up with guys who were going into their daddies’ firms. Lot of bond dealers in there, a few lawyers.”

      “Not your kind of law, right?” Annie said, breaking her promise.

      “Corporate takeovers, leaseback deals, condo mortgages. Law that talks on paper.”

      “Then what happened?” Annie said. “Pamela trotted you out to the family as a symbol of her tiny rebellion?”

      “Not that crass,” I said. “In the gesture department, I was a large cut above brassiere-burning. Pamela cared for me. Genuinely.”

      “Well,” Annie said, “shows her innate good taste.”

      “Put it like this,” I said. “It added a dash of piquancy to the love affair that I was the only man she brought home who didn’t have his own boat over at the Royal Canadian Yacht Club.”

      “You had boxing gloves.”

      “Things went along, three, four years of marriage, and I seemed less exotic to Pamela.”

      “She must have met your clients.”

      “She ran out of rebellion,” I said. “Her gang went to Lyford Cay for February, flats in Belgravia, walking trips up Kilimanjaro. I didn’t fit in with the gang. Pamela stayed home with me out of loyalty, but she felt on the sidelines.”

      Annie put down her knife and fork and whistled the first bars of “April in Paris.”

      “Eventually she went,” I said. “As the unattached spouse.”

      Annie touched my arm.

      “Never mind, Crang,” she said. “I’m prying too much.”

      “She had an affair with a Swedish guy she met at a hotel on Sardinia.”

      “Really? How’d you feel?” Annie asked. She was getting right back into it.

      “Lousy,” I said. “For about a day and a half. What made it less painful is I’d already been through the hard part. I knew the thing between Pamela and me had gone to its grave long before she admitted it to anyone. To me, anyway.”

      “Prescient you.”

      “Hardly,” I said. “One time I remember, watershed event, Pamela flew to Acapulco with a woman named Sass, her first excursion without me. Sass told her what to pack. New bikini, Sonia Rykiel sundresses, a bottle of Joy. Get my drift? Sass was the bad kid in the gang, and when Pamela came back, she was changed in ways that told me our marriage wouldn’t last into the sunset years.”

      “What ways?” Annie said. “She cancelled her subscription to Ms.? What? Took Amnesty International off her list of charities?”

      “Let’s just say,” I said, “I knew Pamela was on her way home to the family and all that that entails.”

      Annie picked up her paper napkin from her lap and wiped very slowly around her mouth. She was fighting the urge to ask me more specifics about the change in Pamela after Acapulco. She won the fight.

      “Where’s Pamela got to?” she asked. It was a neutral question. “Since you and she broke up, I mean.”

      “She married a guy named Archie. His daddy’s firm, Archie’s now, makes cellophane wrappers.”

      “The kind you put peanuts in? I don’t believe it,” Annie said. “For crackers? That kind of cellophane?”

      “I didn’t say the old family businesses had to do something distinguished.”

      “Lot of money in cellophane, I suppose,” Annie said.

      “It puts Archie close to Pamela’s league,” I said. “They’ve got a house in Ardwold Gate and a daughter at Branksome.”

      “What’s her СКАЧАТЬ