Kisser (2010)

gave her an inordinately generous divorce settlement without complaint, and if that isn’t love, I don’t know what is.”
    “Those things generally arise from necessity, not love,” Stone observed. “It’s my understanding that a judge allotted the marital assets. After all, they had been married for nine years.”
    “It was less than three years,” Eggers said. “My friend’s view is that his client, besotted, spent a fortune on Ms. Cox’s training as an actress and dancer, not to mention her wardrobe and jewelry, before and during the marriage, and that she returned the favor by sleeping with her acting teacher, her dancing coach, and whoever else was handy. My friend described her as sexually wanton.”
    “A trait I’ve always admired in a woman,” Stone said.
    “Though not necessarily in a client,” Eggers pointed out.
    “Bill, do you have some suggestion about my course of action in this case?”
    “I do, though I know you are unlikely to accept any such suggestion.”
    “I’ll try to be broad-minded,” Stone said.
    “I suggest that you extricate yourself from this woman’s clutches as quickly as you can politely do so, because if my friend’s opinion is of any consequence, she will eventually turn on you, and she may still own that razor.”
    “I must say that I hadn’t noticed that I was in her, as you put it, ‘clutches,’ ” Stone said.
    “Perhaps ‘clenches’ would have been a better word,” Eggers said.
    “Perhaps, but that is not a bad place to be.”
    Eggers sighed. “All right, I suppose the only other thing I can do is to exhort you to be very, very careful in your dealings with her and to keep your physician’s number in your pocket.”
    “All right, I’ll do that,” Stone said.
    “That said, I have something for you.”
    “Oh, good. Wayward wife? Wayward son?” A good deal of Stone’s work for Woodman & Weld had involved one or the other.
    “Wayward daughter,” Eggers said.
    “Uh-oh.”
    “Exactly.” Eggers wrote something on a slip of paper and handed it to Stone. “Her name is Hildy Parsons, and this is her address and phone number.”
    “What is her particular problem?” Stone asked.
    “How much time do you have?”
    “I’m at your disposal.”
    “All right, it began in high school, when she had an affair with one of her teachers that resulted in his firing and her transferring to an institution operated by nuns. Her father managed to keep this business fairly quiet, and the girl is very bright, so she actually got into Harvard and earned her degree in the usual four years, though she formed a number of other inappropriate attachments along the way.”
    “And what sort of inappropriate attachment has she now formed?” Stone asked.
    “An artist,” Eggers said, “or so he styles himself. He has a studio downtown somewhere, from which he is alleged to be operating a dealership in drugs. Her father is concerned first that he might persuade her to partake and second that when the authorities finally nail him, she will be charged as an accessory—before, during, and/ or after the fact.”
    “Is her father Philip Parsons, the art dealer on East Fifty-seventh Street?”
    “He is, and I think it a good idea if you visit with him.” Eggers consulted the eighteenth-century clock in the corner behind his desk. “You won’t need an appointment; he’s expecting you in ten minutes.”
    “And what, exactly, does Mr. Parsons expect me to do?”
    “I’m sure that will emerge in your chat with him,” Eggers said.
    Stone got to his feet. “You did tell him that I don’t do contract killings, didn’t you?”
    Eggers shook his hand. “I don’t believe I mentioned that,” he said. “Good day, Stone, and please, please be careful.”
    Stone left, still feeling unendangered.

13
    STONE WALKED FROM EGGERS’ S OFFICE in the Seagram Building, up Park Avenue, and took a left on East Fifty-seventh Street. On the way he pondered his friend’s information about Carrie and decided to discount ninety-five percent of it as the rant of a rejected husband, but he was not entirely sure of which five percent to believe.
    His reverie was interrupted when he arrived at the Parsons Gallery, a wide building with a gorgeous Greek sculpture of a woman’s head spotlighted in the center of the window. Stone approached a very beautiful and impossibly thin young woman who was seated at a desk thumbing through a catalogue.
    “Good morning. Can I help you?” she