Fidelity Read Free Page A

was polished and smelling of lemons, with only a set of IN and ouT boxes that held a phone directory and a hole punch. Phil was not really a neat person. His orderliness came from the military, where they had trained him to straighten and polish the surfaces that showed.
    She opened the drawers and filing cabinets, looking for something that was not routine and ordinary. She found time cards and payroll documents that had been annotated in his handwriting as recently as yesterday. She found a copy of a letter he had signed requesting payment of a final bill for what looked like a divorce case. She took it out to Ray Hall. “See this letter? As of yesterday, he was still interested in having this woman pay him. If she gets the letter tomorrow and puts the check in the mail right away, he still wouldn’t get it until two days later. He was expecting to be back.”
    “Marilyn Tynan,” said Hall. The three men looked at each other and said nothing. Bill Przwalski began to empty the wastebaskets into a cardboard box.
    “What?” she asked.
    “That’s not a new one. It’s a divorce case we did three years ago. Phil just has April send a bill to her and a few others every month with all the current ones. She’ll never pay. Did he even sign that?”
    She turned it around and held it so Ray Hall could see it. “Yes.”
    Hall shrugged. “Sometimes he doesn’t bother.”
    Bill Przwalski’s cardboard box was full of trash. He lifted it.
    “Put that down, Billy,” she said. He lowered it to his desk. “Now, one of you tell me what you think is going on.”
    The others looked at Ray Hall. He took a breath, then let it out. “I don’t feel happy about telling you this, Emily. On a hunch, when I went into Phil’s office, I got the company bank-account numbers, and called them. The bank’s computer says Kramer Investigations has a hundred and fifty in one account, and two hundred in the other.”
    “Dollars?” said Emily. “You’re talking about a hundred and fifty dollars?”
    “Yes.”
    Her eyes moved across the faces of the three men, who now stared back at her openly. She reached into her purse, took out her checkbook, stepped to the front of April’s desk, picked up the telephone, and dialed the number on her checks. The cheerful machine voice told her to give the account number and then the last four digits of her Social Security number. When she had punched in the numbers, the machine began to recite a list of choices. She pressed four for a balance. “Your account balance is … seventy-three dollars and … seventeen cents. To return to the main menu, press eight. To speak with a representative, press zero.”
    Emily muttered, “Oh, my God,” then pressed the zero and waited. The voice said, “Please hold. All our representatives are busy right now, but your call is important to us.”
    She kept the telephone to her ear. “The money’s gone from our account, too.” The men didn’t look surprised.
    She heard the elevator doors open and close. She held the telephone and watched the office door with the others. When it swung open, she noticed that their eyes had all been focused at the level of Phil Kramer’s face, but he was not the one who stepped in. Their eyes dropped about a foot to the face of April Dougherty. As she stepped inside, Emily and the three men stood still, watching her, but nobody greeted her. She glanced at the men without surprise, then faced Emily. “Good morning.”
    “Hi, April.” Emily kept the phone to her ear.
    “I’ll just be a minute,” April said. “I want to collect a few personal belongings, and then I’ll be out of your way. Have the police been here yet?”
    “Not yet.”
    April moved to her desk, and began opening the drawers and setting things on the white blotter. They were spare and pitiful: a coffee cup with a flower on it, a little male bee hovering over it and a little female bee hiding behind the stem. Beside it were a plastic dispenser for no-calorie