“I found us a new client,” I said. “I want to see if the retainer check clears.”

“You smell like a chimney.”

“This new client is a bit nervous.”

“Why don’t you just have Morris do a background check for you?” she said, referring to Morris Kapustin, our usual private detective.

“This isn’t big enough yet to bring in Morris.”

A brown Chevette cut in front of me on the expressway and I slammed my horn. The guy in the Chevette swung around into a different lane and slowed to give me the finger. I gestured back. He shouted something and I shouted something and we jawed at each other for a few moments, neither hearing a word of what the other was yelling, before he sped away.

“So tell me about the new client. Who is he?”

“She is Caroline Shaw. Her sister, one Jacqueline Shaw, killed herself, apparently. Caroline doesn’t believe it was a suicide. She suspects one of my clients and wants me to investigate. I’m certain it’s nothing more than what it looks like but I figure I can keep her out of trouble if I can convince her. My clients don’t like being accused of murder.”

“That’s rather noble of you.”

“She gave us a ten-thousand-dollar retainer.”

“I should have figured.”

“Even nobility has a price. You know what knight-hoods go for these days?”

A maroon van started sliding out of its lane, inching closer and closer to the side of my car. I pressed my horn and accelerated away from the van, braking just in time to avoid a Cadillac, before veering into the center lane.

“It’s not the sort of thing you usually take up, Victor. I didn’t know you had an investigator’s license.”

“She paid us a ten-thousand-dollar retainer, Beth. If the check clears, I’ll buy a belted raincoat and turn into Philip Marlowe.”

The First Mercantile Bank of the Main Line was a surprising choice for Caroline Shaw’s checking account. It was a stately white-shoe bank with three discreet offices and a huge estates department to handle the peculiar bequests of the wealthy dead. The bank’s jumbo mortgage rates were surprisingly low, the rich watched every penny with a rapaciousness that would stun, but the bank’s credit checks were vicious, kicking out all but those with the littlest need for the institution’s money. It catered to the very wealthy suburban crowd who didn’t want to deal with the hoi polloi when they dug their paws into their piles of gold and laughed. The bank didn’t discriminate against the not very rich, of course, but keep just a few hundred dollars in a checking account at the First Mercantile Bank of the Main Line and the fees would wipe out your principal in a breathtakingly short time. Keep a few hundred thousand and your Yves St. Laurent designer checks were complimentary. Wood-paneled offices, tellers in Brooks Brothers suits, personal banking, ads in The Wall Street Journal proclaiming the soundness of their investment advice for portfolios of two million dollars or more. Sorry, no, they didn’t cash welfare checks at the First Mercantile Bank of the Main Line and the glass door was always locked so that they could bar your entry until they gave you the once-over, as if they were selling diamond tiaras.

Even though I was in a suit, and Beth was in a nice print dress, we had to knock twice and smile gamely before we heard the buzz.

“Yes, can I help you?” said a somberly dressed young man with a thin smile who greeted us as soon as we stepped inside. I guessed he was some sort of a concierge, there to take the rich old ladies’ coats and escort them to the tapestry chairs arranged before willing and obsequious personal bankers.

“We need to cash a check,” I said.

“Do either of you have an account here?”

I looked around at the portraits of old bankers tacked onto the dark walnut of the walls, gray-haired men in their frock coats staring solemnly down at me with disapproval. Even if I was a Rothschild I don’t think I would have felt comfortable in that bank and, believe me, I was no Rothschild.

“No,” I said. “No account.”

“I’m sorry, sir, but we don’t cash checks for those without accounts here.” He whispered so as not to embarrass us, which was very considerate of him, considering. “There is a Core States Bank branch down the road a bit, I’m sure they could be of assistance.”

“We’re being sloughed off,” said Beth.

“It’s policy, ma’am,” said the concierge. “I’m sorry.”

“I’ve been sloughed off by worse places than this,” I said. “But still…”

The concierge stepped to the side and opened the door graciously for us to leave. “I hope we can be of service another time.”

“But the check I wanted to cash,” I said in a loud voice, “was drawn on this very bank.” And then I raised my voice even louder, not in anger, my tone still kindly, but the voice high enough and the syllables distinct enough so that I could have been heard in the rear of the balcony, had there been one. “You don’t mean to say that you won’t honor a check drawn on this bank?”

Heads reared, a personal banker stood, an old lady turned slowly to look at me and grabbed tightly to her purse. The concierge put a hand on my forearm, his face registering as much shock as if I had started babbling in Yiddish right there in that gilded tomb of a bank building.

Before he could say anything else a wonderfully dressed older man with nervous hands and razored gray hair was at his side.

“Thank you, James,” the older man said, his pale blue eyes fixed on my brown ones. “I’ll take it from here.” The young concierge bowed and backed away. “Follow me, please.”

We walked in a column to a desk in the middle of the bank’s dark-carpeted main room and were seated on the tapestry seats of claw-and-ball chairs. Atop the desk was a bronze name plate that read: “Mr. Jeffries.” “Now,” said the impeccably dressed Jeffries with an impeccably false smile, “you said you wished to cash a check drawn on an account at this bank?”

I reached into my jacket pocket and Jeffries flinched ever so slightly. Not the main man in this bank, I figured, if he was flinching from so minimally an imagined threat. From my jacket I pulled out Caroline Shaw’s check, unfolded it, read it once again, and handed it over.

Jeffries’s eyes rose in surprise when he examined the check. “And you’re Mr. Carl?”

“The very same. Is the check any good?”

There was a computer on his desk and I expected him to make a quick review of the account balance, of which I hoped to grab a peek, but that’s not what he did. What he did instead was to simply say, “I’ll need identification.”

I dug for my wallet and pulled out my driver’s license.

“And a credit card.”

I pulled that out, too. “So the check is good?”

He examined my license and MasterCard. “If you’ll just endorse the check, Mr. Carl.”

I signed the back. He compared my signature to the license and the credit card, making some notations beneath my signature on the check.

“And how would you like this paid, Mr. Carl, cash or cashier’s check?”

“Cash.”

“Are hundreds satisfactory?”

“Perfectly.”

“One moment, please,” and then with my license and credit card and check he stood and turned and walked out of the room to somewhere in the rear of the building.

“Your Miss Shaw seems to be known in this bank,” said Beth.

“Yes, either she has a substantial account or she is a known forger and the police will be out presently.”

“Which do you expect?”

“Oh the police,” I said. “I have found it is always safest to expect the worst. Anything else is mere accident.”

It took a good long time, far too long a time. I waited, first patiently, then impatiently, and then angrily. I was about to stand and make another scene when Jeffries finally returned. Behind him came another man, about my age, handsome enough and tall enough and blond enough so that he seemed as much a part of the bank as the paneling on the walls and the portraits in their gilded frames. I wondered to which eating club at Princeton he had belonged.