Final Option

couldn’t help but know the difference.
    When Russell died I knew that a certain kind of love was gone for me as surely as an amputee knows he will not spontaneously regenerate a lost limb. I mourned that part of me as I had mourned Russell, and then went on to fill my life with the things that were still there.
    When Elliott kissed me I began to wonder if what I thought was gone had instead just been pushed down so deep inside of me that I’d assumed it had disappeared. On the sidewalk in front of my office I had felt the prodding of some forgotten ember, an inkling that if not love, certainly attraction was possible again for me. Grimly sprinting by the lake I found myself wondering whether that was an entirely good thing.
     
    I arrived at the office and immediately cracked open the first of the boxes that had come from Hexter’s house. Cheryl had arranged for me to see Torey Lloyd at the Lake View Towers apartment at two, and I wanted to sift through as many of the papers as I could before then. I soon discovered that it wasn’t going to be easy.
    Hexter may have had a tremendous ability to manipulate numbers, but he clearly had no particular facility for accounting. It wasn’t surprising that someone with Pamela’s penchant for lists and order would have felt the need to keep an eye on him. In the boxes I found envelopes from six different brokerage houses—all unopened. Many held confirmations of the purchase or sale of stock, while others held account statements. After two hours of slitting open envelopes I had managed to unearth three uncashed dividend checks as well.
    One of the boxes contained the statements from Bart and Pamela’s joint bank accounts. They were neatly rubber banded together, labeled and chronologically arranged—no doubt by Pamela. I examined them with great interest. The story of our lives is written, at least in part, in the money that we spend. Almost all of the checks were written in Pamela’s hand, and the story they told was an expensive one.
    By the time I was due to leave for my appointment with Torey Lloyd, I’d learned several very interesting things. Among them: It cost more to heat Bart Hexter’s house a month than Cheryl, my secretary, earned over the same period of time. That the Hexters paid dues to no fewer than seven different country clubs, including one in Palm Springs and one in Tucson. That Bart and Pamela gave Margot $10,000 a month, not including the $1,200 they shelled out directly to her shrink. And, most interesting of all, while Bart Hexter had died with $47,000 in cash in his desk drawer, he had never withdrawn more than $900 a month in cash from any of his accounts.
     
    By the time I arrived at Lake View Towers I was convinced that I was the only person in Chicago working that afternoon. The parks that fringed the lake were filled with people, all playing. Parents were pushing strollers toward the aquarium and the streets were thick with cyclists. People were playing Frisbee with their dogs.
    The apartment that Hexter rented for his mistress was on the thirty-eighth floor of the waterfront high rise. Torey met me at the door and, with little more than a nod for greeting, led me inside. I don’t know what I expected—maybe red furniture and paintings on black velvet, but the apartment surprised me. It was large and modem, filled with light, and commanded a grand view of the lake. The floors were bleached oak, the walls and furniture white, all meant, no doubt, as a background for several pieces of daring modem art that dominated the interior and balanced the panorama beyond the window.
    The floor plan was open, and in the dining room I saw a long glass table surrounded by high-back chairs reminiscent of Frank Lloyd Wright. Beyond it, I glimpsed a sleek Italian modem kitchen with counter tops of rose-colored granite. According to her personnel file, Torey earned $21,000 a year as a runner for Hexter Commodities. It was obviously not her salary that had paid for this apartment.
    Torey motioned me into a large armchair of cream-colored leather. She, in turn, curled herself into a corner of the matching sofa. I hadn’t seen her up close before, and I understood why Elliott had lingered in her doorway in order to catch a better glimpse of her. Her face was a magnet to the eye. Once you looked at her it was an effort to look away. And yet it wasn’t a perfection of features that drew you in. Her eyes, it is true, were enormous—a cloudy violet that