Fast and Loose

13

Mike listened while Stone outlined the problem. “I’ll put two people with each of them, one to watch the scene, the other to stick close.”

“Uh, Mike, there will be times when the daughter won’t need that coverage.”

“What sort of times?”

“The times when she’s with me.”

“Are you prepared to go armed at those times and explain to her why you’re carrying?”

“It would be better than having a strange man in my bedroom,” Stone replied.

“As you wish. I’ll put Viv Bacchetti in charge of getting a team together. I’ll send a team to the clinic to survey the strengths and weaknesses of the place, and I’ll have personal protection in place by five o’clock today.”

“Make that ten tomorrow morning for Marisa,” Stone said.

“Gotcha. Anything else?”

“It might be a good idea to put one of your shrinks to the task of disassembling Erik Macher’s psyche, with an eye toward predicting his moves.”

“A thoughtful suggestion. They sometimes complain about not being given enough work. Talk to you later.”

Both men hung up.

Joan buzzed. “A Dr. Carlsson on one,” she said.

Stone picked up the phone. “Paul?”

“Not the first time I’ve been mistaken for my father,” Marisa said.

“I was under-informed. I’m sorry.”

“My late appointment has been canceled. May I come to you for a drink before dinner? I want to see how you live.”

“I’d be delighted. Seven o’clock, if Swedes are congenitally punctual, six-thirty if they tend to run late.”

“See you at seven. I have the address.” She hung up.

Stone buzzed Joan. “Next time tell me which Dr. Carlsson,” he said, then hung up before she could come back with a snappy reply.

Marisa was punctual; the bell rang as the second hand reached the top of the clock. Stone let her in the front door, and they kissed lightly.

“So far, so good,” she said. “I like the flowers planted outside — not what you’d expect from a born-again bachelor.”

He led her into the living room, where she stopped and performed a slow 360-degree turn. “This is you, but not entirely you,” she said. “I see a little of an older person. How did you come by this house?”

“I think perhaps I’d better get us a drink before I tell you that story because it’s a few paragraphs long.”

She followed him into the study, looking carefully around.

“What would you like to drink?”

“What was that stuff you asked me for last evening?”

“Knob Creek bourbon.”

“Some of that, please, and put this in your freezer.” She reached into one of her two commodious handbags and extracted a bottle of Akvavit. “For future occasions.”

“Certainly,” he said, opening the door and inserting it, then he poured them both a Knob Creek.

She sniffed it, then had a taste, smacking her lips. “Not as bad as I thought it would be,” she said.

“I’ll let Kentucky know you said so. In addition to being sexually liberated, Swedes are also frank.”

“Germans are frank,” she said. “Swedes are candid.”

“I see.”

“Are these your mother’s paintings?”

“They are. You’re very well informed.”

“I am a researcher by nature.”

“Is that a Swedish trait?”

She took a chair. “More a personal one.”

Stone sat beside her. “You were born and raised in New York, right?”

“Yes.”

“How did you get to be so Swedish?”

“By way of genetics, since both my parents are Swedish, and by nature, acquired in my summers in that country as a girl. I had many opportunities to compare, and I found Swedes to be better role models than Americans.”

“In what ways?”

“First, you were going to tell me the story of how you acquired this house.”

“Ah. By a rather torturous route. My parents were natives of western Massachusetts, where their own parents were engaged in the weaving of woolen cloth, on rather a large scale. The two families were close, and by the time they were teenagers, my father and mother were deeply in love, somewhat to the alarm of their respective parents.”

“Too young?”

“That, and my father’s ambitions. He was destined for the law at Yale, where generations of Barringtons had matriculated, but he wanted more than anything to be a carpenter and a maker of furniture, which they considered to be beneath their station in life. Then there was the subject of his social and political views.”

“Which were?”

“Probably more Swedish than American — very left-leaning. The two young people were forbidden to marry. By this time my father was professing communism, in its purer form. This caused my father’s parents to disown him.”

“How harsh!”

“It was. Then they eloped, and my mother was disowned by her parents for marrying my father, and the schism was complete. They moved to Greenwich Village, where my mother’s gift for painting blossomed, and my father became a handyman, calling door-to-door at people’s houses, toting his toolbox, seeking work and finding enough to allow him to, eventually, acquire his own woodworking shop and to begin thinking about having me. During those early years they were secretly helped along by my maternal grandmother’s widowed sister, her aunt Eloise, who owned and lived in this house.

“Eloise helped them most by commissioning my father to make all the doors, bookcases, and wood furniture for the house, over a period of years. It became a showcase for him and allowed him to add the word ‘designer’ to his job title. When Aunt Eloise died, in her nineties, she willed the house to me.”

“How lovely!”

“It was lovely, but in her later years the infrastructure had aged along with her, so a very thorough renovation was required, and having trained at my father’s knee, I did much of the work myself, getting into considerable debt along the way.

“Then, when I was rescued from the NYPD by Woodman & Weld, I earned enough to pay off the debt and complete the job. Recently, the smaller house next door was for sale, and I bought it to house my secretary, housekeeper, and butler.”

“You have a butler?”

“Yes, he was originally a gift from a French friend of mine, who sent him to me for a year, then I hired him. His name is Fred, and you’ll meet him when he drives us to dinner.”

“This bourbon drink is getting better,” she said, glancing at her watch, “but I think we should have our second one at the restaurant.”

“Ever punctual,” Stone said, ringing for Fred.