Final Option

how you must have grown up.“
    “Maybe it’s rebellion,” I offered. “I grew up in a home where living well was considered a full-time occupation, You’ll have to see my parents’ house sometime. It’s a marvel. As soon as you throw something in the wastebasket someone comes and empties it. My entire life I never saw a ketchup bottle or a paper napkin or carton of milk on the table. When I was a child I used to play a game. I’d use a towel in the morning and spend ten minutes trying to fold it and rehang it perfectly. I’d come home after school and check. No matter how good a job I’d done, the maid would have taken it down and refolded it more perfectly. To me there’s a certain freedom in not worrying about any of that.“
    “Freedom and bad eating habits,” interjected Elliott. “Are you sure you won’t try some grapefruit? They’re very good. My grandmother sends them up from Florida for me.”
    “No thanks,” I said, smiling at this fussy side of him. “Is there anything in the paper about Pamela Hexter?”
    “I was reading the sports section,” he said, handing me the paper and beginning to clean up. “I spoke to Elkin this morning. He said that Pamela has been moved out of intensive care. He doesn’t think her suicide attempt was in any way an admission of guilt. He agrees with you that she finds herself in an untenable position. If she didn’t kill her husband, she realizes it must have been one of her children. Under the circumstances, she saw the sleeping pills as the least painful alternative.”
    “There’s no mention of it in the Tab,” I reported.
    “That’s something, anyway.”
    “So does Caufield want you to narrow your investigation to the kids?”
    “No. I don’t think Pamela wants to see her money being spent to implicate one of her children. Elkin wants me to concentrate on blowing the maid’s evidence out of the water. I also thought I’d check who at Hexter Commodities could have set you up yesterday. What are you up to today?”
    “I’m going to Bermuda.”
     
    Elliott stuck by my side all morning. First stop was in Hyde Park, where I dropped in at my apartment to change and gather up a few things. In light of our discussion that morning, I felt a little self-conscious about our eccentric assortment of furniture and sorry state of housekeeping in general. Much to my surprise, Claudia had just come home and was sitting at the kitchen table eating bagels with a nice-looking, fair-haired man whom she introduced, a bit sheepishly, as Jeff McConnell. The two of them had just come off their rotation, she explained, and had stopped in for breakfast.
    While I went into my bedroom to change, Elliott sat in the living room and used the phone. I dug a suit of cream-colored linen out of the back of my closet, scrounged some light-colored pumps, gathered up some other clothes, and extracted my passport from the bottom of my underwear drawer.
    After that we stopped at my office, where Elliott endeared himself to Cheryl, whom I’d called earlier and who had already procured my plane ticket and made my hotel reservations. I checked in with Ken Kurlander to make sure that he had no knowledge of Hexter maintaining offshore accounts, and asked him to have his secretary bring down a copy of Hexter’s death certificate. In the meantime I culled the documents I thought I’d need to prepare myself for the CFTC, made sure I had fresh batteries for the small tape recorder I used for dictation and for the Walkman I invariably listen to when I travel, and shifted my wallet and passport into my briefcase.
    Cheryl buzzed me and asked if I’d be back that evening for a chamber music concert I was scheduled to attend with Stephen. I told her to call and cancel while Elliott looked on with hooded eyes.
     
    I felt out of place and slightly martyred on the flight to Bermuda. The only business traveler on a plane full of vacationers, I curled up in my first-class seat, popped a cassette into my Walkman, and attempted to forget that everyone around me was having a good time while I tried to outline a response to the CFTC’s Wells Notice.
    Getting off the plane the air felt soft and warm and I was seized with a sudden torpor. Everything about me suddenly seemed incongruous and out of place: my business suit, my briefcase, the panty hose that had instantly attached themselves to my legs in the humidity. I stood in line at Customs, presented my passport, and received my cheery,