They dined before a cheerful fire in Stone’s study. Bob and Sugar slept by the hearth, curled up together. “I like your house,” Meg said. “How old is it?”
“Seventy years or so. I inherited it from my great-aunt, my grandmother’s sister. I did most of the restoration work myself, just about everything that didn’t require a license, like plumbing and electrics.”
“How could you afford to live here on a police detective’s salary?”
“I couldn’t,” Stone replied. “I was up to my ears in debt when an old friend from law school invited me to join his firm. I had never gotten a law license, so I took a cram course and passed the bar. He had it in mind that I specialize in handling the cases the firm didn’t want to be seen handling—in short, the personal, often messy side of clients’ lives. My experience as a cop helped.”
“That doesn’t sound as though it could make you rich enough to live like this.”
“Oh, I did better and better, as time passed, and my clients got better, too. Then I married the widow of an actor—you remember Vance Calder?”
“Who doesn’t?”
“Arrington and I had had a relationship for a while when she met Vance, and they were soon married. He had become extremely wealthy during his long career. Arrington didn’t know it, but she was pregnant when they married. Our son, Peter, who took my name after Vance’s death, is a film director in Los Angeles, and his partner is Dino’s son, Ben.”
“So you married a rich widow?”
“I did, and I helped her become richer before she was murdered by an ex-lover.”
“And you inherited everything?”
“Oh, no, only about a third. The bulk of it went into a trust for Peter, which I manage. He’s old enough now to take charge of it himself, but he’s asked me to continue in that role.”
“So, like me, you became suddenly rich?”
“Not quite. I was doing very well in my practice and I was made a partner in Woodman & Weld. While she was alive we lived mostly on my income, while continuing to build her fortune. I preferred it that way.”
“But you experienced the shock of suddenly being able to have anything you want, just as I did.”
“Not exactly—that took a while to dawn on me. That’s when I started buying houses—my great weakness, as you have come to know.”
“I could use some advice on how to conduct myself,” Meg said.
Stone took a sip of his wine. “Go shopping,” he said.
“I have already done so,” she replied, laughing.
“Not just clothes and jewelry—art, if you like it, the airplane we talked about, a place in New York, and maybe a vacation house somewhere you love. The aircraft can take you there. Just keep remembering—you earned it, and you deserve it. That’s more than I could say for myself.”
“That’s good advice. I didn’t ask you about your family.”
“Ah, they’re an interesting story. My parents grew up together in a town in western Massachusetts called Great Barrington. They were, I think, third cousins, and their fathers were both in the textile business—woolens, mainly. When it became obvious that the young people were attracted to each other, their parents deeply disapproved.”
“Why? Genetics?”
“No, politics. My father and, to a lesser extent, my mother held leftist views. My father was for a while a card-carrying Communist. He had no interest in his family’s wealth or their business. I think he felt guilty that he had had such a privileged upbringing. He was at Yale when he discovered a love for woodworking, and he wanted to make that his trade. His father, of course, wanted him in the business, but he disdained that.
“After a couple of years at Yale, which he had spent seeing my mother as much as possible—she was at Mount Holyoke—they eloped, he dropped out of college, and they moved to New York to live a bohemian existence. My mother was a talented painter. Both their parents disowned them, my father for being a Communist, my mother for marrying my father.”
“And your father became a woodworker?”
“Not at first—that required space for a shop and a lot of expensive tools. He began by going door-to-door in Greenwich Village with his toolbox, offering to do odd jobs. Gradually, he got small commissions—a bookcase, a dining table. My mother’s paintings were selling, and together they saved enough to make a down payment on a house with room for a shop in the cellar. After a few years he had earned an excellent reputation as a designer and craftsman. In fact, he made just about every wooden thing in this house. I helped him when I was a teenager, and I learned the skills from him that helped me renovate this house. They’re both gone now.”
“What a lovely story.”
“What about your family?”
“My father was an aeronautical engineer, and after Stanford he was hired by Douglas Aircraft and made a career there. He was on the design team for many of their models. My mother taught high school in Santa Monica, and they lived near her work and his. I was born late in their marriage—quite a surprise, I think.
“We were solidly middle class—I didn’t have to work my way through college. I had a golden California girlhood, spent a lot of time at the beach with boys who were clearly not going to amount to anything, although a few of them did. One made a fortune building surfboards.
“I was interested in engineering, but more interested in electronics. I followed my father to Stanford, where I studied computer science, instead of airplanes. I worked at Apple for a while, then, when they showed too little interest in what I wanted to do, I started consulting, wrote a couple of pieces of successful commercial software, which made me some cash, founded Harmony, and the rest, as they say, is history.”
* * *
—
FRED CLEARED their dishes, and Stone poured them both a cognac, then he leaned back in his chair and regarded her. “Why do I get the feeling that I haven’t heard the whole story about you and Gino Bellini?”
“Well,” she said, “I guess that’s because I haven’t told you the whole story.”
“If I’m going to stop him from ruining your business and killing you, I think I should know everything.”
Meg sighed. “I suppose it would be ungrateful of me not to tell you about it.”
“Worse, it could be dangerous.”
“All right,” she said. “I guess it’s time, and I’ve had just enough to drink.”
15
Meg took another swig of her brandy, and, her tongue thus loosened, she began.
“Gino and I met at Stanford and had what, for that time, would pass as a torrid affair. He was more attractive then—less bullish-looking, slender, and at times, quite funny.
“He got me through my coding courses, being something of a prodigy, where I was klutzy. I had good ideas for what the software should do, but I was not good at telling it how. Gino sort of came behind me with a broom and a dustpan and made my ideas work. We were a good team, two sides of the same coin.
“I also took a lot of business courses, and I was way ahead of him in that regard. I planned for several years to do a start-up, and when I was getting ready I finally told him about it. He went nuts, accusing me of shutting him out of the profits that should come from his work. I took a hard line. I told him I would give him five percent of the company and he could buy another five percent, and that if he objected to that he could pay for the whole ten percent. He borrowed money to scrape up the investment. What I didn’t know was that he borrowed it from a guy who was a loan shark.