The silvery clips of the gardener’s shears came closer and closer until the hairs on the tips of Grimes’s ears pricked up. With each scissoring of the clippers a cold slid down the back of his neck. The old lady looked at him with her one good eye almost as if she were casting a spell.

“Well, enough family business,” she said, and instantly the gardener’s shears fell silent. “Tell us about your ideas for the wedding, Mr. Grimes. We are all so excited, so certain that you will make our Jacqueline terribly happy.”

As he stammered a few words about their plans, how they wanted to be married as soon as possible, the old lady started to rise and the gardener was quickly at her side, helping her to stand. She left her cane resting on the bench and with her free hand grabbed tightly onto Grimes’s arm. Her grip was cold and fierce as she walked with him and the gardener back to the house.

“There is no need to blindly dash into something as deadly serious as marriage, is there?” she asked as they walked. “Take your time, Mr. Grimes, wait, be certain. That is our advice,” she said and then she chatted almost gaily about the flowers, and the grass, and of how the high level of humidity in the air exacerbated her asthma.

Shortly after that visit, Grandmother Shaw died in her ninety-ninth year. She had given explicit instructions that she was to be cremated and her ashes intermingled with the ashes of her husband and placed again beneath the feet of the statue of Aphrodite. The funeral was a bleak and sparsely attended affair. It was shortly after the funeral that Jacqueline first started fearing for her life.

She claimed there were men following her, she claimed to see dark visions in her meditations. When they walked along the city streets she was forever turning around, searching for something. Grimes never spotted anything behind them but he humored her fears. When he asked her what it was that frightened her so, she admitted that she feared one of her brothers was trying to kill her. She said that murder ran in her family, something about her grandfather and her father. She wouldn’t have been surprised if her grandmother died not from an asthma attack but was smothered with a pillow by one of her brothers. The only family members she ever talked about with kindness were her sister and her dear sweet Grammy. Grimes never told her of his brutal conversation with Grandmother Shaw. They would have married immediately but for a delay in Grimes’s divorce proceedings. He offered his wife everything, he didn’t care, because everything he had was nothing compared to all he would have, but still the case dragged on. And still Jacqueline’s fears increased.

Then, one winter evening, he returned to the apartment from his dental office. She had been at the Haven all morning, meditating, but was supposed to be home when he arrived. He called out to her and heard nothing. He looked in the bedroom, the bathroom, he called her name again. He was looking so intently he almost passed right by her as she hung from the gaudy crystal chandelier in her orange robe, a heavy tasseled rope twisted round her neck. The windows were darkened by thick velvet drapes and the only light in the room came from the chandelier, dappling her with the spectrum of colors sheared free by the crystal. Beneath her thick legs a Chippendale chair lay upon its side. Her feet were bare, her eyes open and seemingly filled with relief. Looking at her hanging there Grimes would almost have imagined her happy, at peace, except for the gray tongue that rested thick and swollen over the pale skin of her chin like a stain. He took one look and knew just how much was gone. He turned right around and took the elevator down and used the doorman’s phone to call the police.

Along with the police came a man, tall and blond. He obtained a hotel room for Grimes that night at the Four Seasons, an apartment in a modern high-rise on Walnut Street for him the very next day. Without having to do anything, Grimes’s possessions were in the new apartment, along with a brand new set of contemporary furniture. The lease was prepaid for two years. On his new big screen television set was a envelope with twenty thousand dollars in cash. That was the last he saw of Jackie or her family. The last he saw of his hundred million.

“You’re right,” I told him as we sat side by side at the Irish Pub, across from his new and fully paid luxury apartment at 2020 Walnut. “That’s an absolute tragedy.”

“So when you talk about almost getting a piddling little share of some crappy little lawsuit,” said Grimes, “I don’t want to hear it.”

“Why’d she kill herself?”

“Who knows? There was no note. She was always so sad, maybe it just got to be too much. Or maybe her paranoia was justified and someone in that gruesome family of hers killed her. I wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t that punkette of a sister, either. But it doesn’t make a difference to me, does it?”

“Guess not. Who was that blond guy who paid you off in the end?”

“Family banker.”

I nodded. “You ever been to a place called Tosca’s?”

“No. Why?”

“Just asking.”

“What’s that, a restaurant?”

“It’s an Italian place up on Wolf Street. Great food is all. I was thinking you can take your wife sometime, make it all up to her.

“Fat chance, that. I tried to go back but she divorced me anyway. I don’t blame her, really. She’s remarried, some urologist, raking it in even with the HMO’s. He’s got this racket where he sticks his finger up some geezer’s butt, feels around, and pulls out a five-hundred-dollar bill. She says she’s happier than she’s ever been. Tells me the sex is ten times better with the urologist, can you believe that?”

“It’s the educated finger.”

“And, you know, I’m glad. She deserves a little happiness. You want to know something else?”

“Sure.”

“I sort of liked her. Jackie, I mean. She was a kook, really, and too sad for words, but I liked her. Even with all her money she was an innocent. We would have been all right together. With her, and a hundred million dollars, I think I finally might have been a little happy.”

He turned back to his drink and swilled the scotch and I watched him, thinking that with a hundred million I might be a little happy too. I took another sip of my beer and started to feel a thin line of nausea unspool in my stomach. And along with the nausea it came upon me again, the same suspicion I had felt before, that somewhere in this unfolding story was my own way into the Reddman fortune. I couldn’t quite figure the route yet, but the sensation this time was clear and thrilling; it was there for me, my road to someone else’s riches, waiting patiently, and all I had to do was discover where the path began and take that first step.

“What now?” I asked myself and I wasn’t even aware I had said it out loud until Grimes answered my question for me.

“Now?” he said. “Now I spend the rest of my life sticking fingers in other people’s mouths.”