Final Option

came across an exchange of letters that made it clear that Hexter had gone so far as to try to have Geiss fired. My stomach churned. I was, I concluded, in deeper shit than I’d thought.
     
    I was still reading when Ken Kurlander appeared at my door with his black top coat over his arm and his black gloves in his hand. It seems he’d taken the train in from Kennilworth that morning, assuming that I would give him a ride to Bart Hexter’s funeral. I began to tell him that I hadn’t planned on going—I had to prepare Hexter’s answer to the CFTC—but Kurlander's icy stare of disapproval stopped me in my tracks. With a sigh, I fetched my coat.
    Kurlander sat primly in the passenger seat of my aged Volvo station wagon, as if to minimize physical contact between himself and my dirty upholstery. To make conversation, he talked about Pamela Hexter. It seems that the police had made another, more thorough search of her house that morning, this time going so far as to even dismantle the garbage disposal. From the loop through Wilmette, Kurlander maintained an indignant monologue about the brutality of the police.
    The funeral was held at St. Stephen’s Church. When we arrived it occurred to me that the parking lot would have made a car thieves’ Eden. It was teeming with Lamborghinis, Testa Rossas and the other heavy metal favored by futures traders mingled with the BMWs and Mercedes of Pamela Hexter’s old-moneyed friends.
    The media was out in full force. A broadcast minivan complete with rooftop radar dish was parked askew on the sidewalk in front of the open oak doors of the church like a dead whale washed up on the beach. Reporters worked the crowd as if it were a prizefight, wielding microphones like truncheons.
    Unhappily, in the church, I found myself seated with my mother on one side and Ken Kurlander on the other. The two of them played ‘who do you know?’ across my lap, pointing out late arrivals, bringing each other up to date on divorce, detox, and disgrace. After the service Kurlander, predictably, accepted Mother’s offer of a ride to the cemetery, thus trading up from my dented Volvo to a Lincoln with a driver.
    The mourners filtered slowly to the graveside. I positioned myself a safe distance from Kurlander and my mother and watched the crowd. Pamela Hexter was as elegant as a Kennedy widow, dry-eyed in a suit of dull black silk. Barton Jr. was at his mother’s side, her arm linked through his, her black-gloved hand grasped protectively by her son. I heard the shutters of the reporters’ cameras and knew that this would be the picture that the newspapers would run next day.
    The Hexter daughters flanked the two of them. Krissy, her pretty face ruined by the scarlet of her spoiled mouth, stood beside her mother fretting with her jewelry. Her husband, Fourey, stood a half a step behind, his head bent in conversation with Jane. Margot, looking bored, had taken up the place beside her brother. She wore a dress that looked like it had been made out of a tattered black tablecloth. She had her arm around a tall, thin young woman who was wearing, of all things, a yellow raincoat.
    Barton Jr. had ordered Hexter Commodities closed for the funeral, and I spotted all the employees off to one side, clustered around Loretta Resch as if for protection. Mrs. Titlebaum was at her side, sobbing quietly into her handkerchief, while Tim, looking lost and miserable, shifted his weight uncomfortably from foot to foot like an oversized little boy trying to keep still at church. He wore a shapeless black raincoat. The sleeves were too short, and his ham hands hung out, awkward and exposed. As the nephew of the deceased he should have been included in the group with the immediate family. I wondered if he’d chosen to stay with his coworkers out of loyalty, or if Pamela’s snub—not selecting him as a pallbearer—extended to exclusion from riding in the limousines reserved for the family.
    When the throng had finally assembled, the last prayers for the commodity trader were said and Black Bart Hexter was lowered into the ground. Pamela watched the casket’s descent, poker straight and dryeyed. Krissy sobbed. Margot stared off into space. Beyond the fringes of the crowd, my eye picked out a man who had partially concealed himself behind a tombstone topped by an elaborately carved statue of an angel. He was using a videocamera to photograph those who had come to pay their last respects to Bart Hexter. With a