“Does Tommy count?”

“Sorry, no. Too bad that. We could have such a nice evening, just you and me. Dinner at the Striped Bass and then orchestra seats to Rigoletto.”

“You’re pushing it, McDeiss.”

“Am I? Jacqueline Shaw. Hung herself in the living room of her apartment at the south end of Rittenhouse Square. Quite a place, if a bit overly baroque in decoration for my palate. Everything seemed to be in order. It was very neat, no clothes lying around, as if she was expecting guests to show up at her hanging. She had been depressed, she had tried it before.”

“How?”

“Too many pills once. Slit her wrists in the bathtub when she was a teen. She was a statistic waiting to be rung up, that’s all. Ahh, here’s my salad.” Fresh Water Chestnut and Baby Arugula Salad with Dry Shrimp Vinaigrette ($8.00). “Oh my goodness, Carl, this dressing is delicious. Want a taste?”

He thrust at me a forkful of greens thick with the vinaigrette.

I shook my head. “Do you think the mother arugula gets upset when the farmer takes her babies?”

McDeiss didn’t answer, he simply turned the fork on himself. As he chewed, the lines in his forehead rose again.

“Who found her?” I asked.

“The boyfriend,” said McDeiss. “They were living together, apparently engaged. Came home from work and found her hanging from the chandelier. He left her up there and called us. A lot of times they cut them down before they call. He just let her hang.”

“Was there a doorman? A guest register?”

“We checked out all the names in and out that day. Everything routine. Her neighbor, a strange player named Peckworth, said he saw a UPS guy in her hallway that day, which got us wondering, because no one had signed in, but then he came back and said he was confused about the day. We checked it out. She had received a package two days before. Not that this Peckworth could have been any kind of a witness anyway. He’s a real treat. Once that was cleared up there was nothing out of the ordinary, nothing suspicious.”

“Did she leave a note?”

He shook his head. “Often they don’t.”

“Find anything suspicious in the apartment?”

“Not a thing.”

“Candy wrappers or trash that didn’t belong?”

“Not a thing. Why? You got something?”

“No.”

“Didn’t think so. The lady had a history of depression, history of drug abuse and alcohol abuse, years of failed therapies, and she was getting involved in some hippie dippy New Age chanting thing out in Mount Airy.”

“That’s the place for it,” I said.

“It all fits.”

“What about the motive?” I softened my voice. “She’s a Reddman, right?”

“Absolutely,” said McDeiss. “A direct heir as a matter of fact. Her great-grandfather was the pickle king, what was his name, Claudius Reddman? The guy on all the jars. Well, the daughter of this Reddman, she married a Shaw, from the Shaw Brothers department stores, and their son is the sole heir for the entire fortune. This Jacqueline was his daughter. There are three other siblings. The whole thing is going to be divided among them.”

I leaned forward. I tried to sound insouciant, but I couldn’t pull it off. “How much is the estate worth?”

“I couldn’t get an exact figure, only estimates,” said McDeiss. “Not much after all these years. Only about half a billion dollars.”

Three heirs left, half a billion dollars. That put Caroline Shaw’s expected worth at something like one hundred and sixty-six million dollars. I reached for my water glass and tried to take a drink, but my hand shook so badly water started slopping over the glass’s edge and I was forced to put it back down.

“So if it wasn’t a suicide,” I suggested, “money could have been a motive.”

“With that much money it’s the first thing we think about.”

“Who benefited from her death?”

“I can’t talk about it.”

“Oh come on, McDeiss.”

“It’s privileged. I can’t talk about it, that’s been made very clear to me. There was a hefty insurance policy and her inheritance was all tied up in a trust. Both were controlled by some bank out in the burbs.”

“First Mercantile of the Main Line, I’ll bet.”

“You got it.”

“By some snot name of Harrington, right?”

“You got it. But the information he gave me about the insurance and the trust was privileged, so you’ll have to go to him.” He leaned forward and lowered his voice. “Look, let me warn you, there was political heat on this investigation. Heat to clean it up quickly. I’ve always been one to clean up my cases, check them off and go onto the next. It’s not like there’s not enough work. But still I was getting the push from the guys downtown. So when the coroner came back calling it a suicide that was enough for me. Case closed.”

“But even with all the heat, you’re talking to me.”

“A good meal, Carl, is worth any indignity,” but after he made his little joke he kept looking at me and something sharp emerged from the fleshy bulbs of his face.

“And you think something stinks, don’t you?” I said. “That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? Not for the baby arugula. Where’d the heat come from? Who called you off?”

He shrugged and finished his salad, poured another glass of wine, drank from it, holding the stem of the glass daintily in his sausage fingers. “The word on the Reddmans,” he said rather mysteriously, “is that it is a family dark with secrets.”

“Society types?”

“Not at all. Best I could tell they’ve been shunned completely, like lepers. All that money and not even in the Social Register. From what I could figure, you and I, we’d be more welcome in certain social circles than the Reddmans.”

“A Jew and an African-American?”

“Well maybe not you.” He laughed broadly at that and then leaned forward and twisted his voice down to a whisper. “The Reddman house is one strange place, Carl, more a huge stone tomb than anything else, with tilting spires and wild, overrun gardens. Veritas, it’s called. Don’t you love it when they name their houses?”

“Veritas? A bit presumptuous, wouldn’t you say?”

“And they pronounce it wrong.”

“You speak Latin?”

His broad shoulders shrugged. “My mother had this thing about a classical education.”

“My mother thinks classical means an olive in her gin.”

“Well, this Veritas was cold as an Eskimo’s hell,” said McDeiss. “As soon as I got there and started asking questions I could feel the freeze descend. The dead girl’s father, the grandson of the pickle king, the word on him is he’s demented. They lock him up in some upstairs room in that mansion. I had some questions for him but they wouldn’t let me up to see him, they physically barred me from going up the stairs, can you believe that? Then, just when I was about to force my way through to get to his room, a call came in from the Roundhouse. The family, through our friend Harrington, had let it be known that they wanted the case closed and suddenly the heat came down from City Hall. See, Carl, money like that, it is its own power, you understand? Money like that, it wants something, it gets it. I never got a chance to see the old man. My lieutenant told me to check off the case and move on.”

“And so you checked.”

“It was a classic suicide. We’d seen it all before a hundred times. There wasn’t much I could do.”

“No matter how much it stunk. I need you to get me the file.”

“No. Absolutely not.”

“I’ll subpoena it.”

“I can’t control what you do.”

“How about the building register for the day of the death?”

He looked down at his salad and speared a lone water chestnut. “There’s nothing there, but okay. And be sure to talk to the boyfriend, Grimes.”

“You think maybe he…”

“All I think is you’ll find him interesting. He lives in that luxury high-rise on Walnut, west of Rittenhouse. You know it?”

I nodded. “By the way, you find any Darvon in her medicine cabinet?”