Great Day for the Deadly Read Free Page B

Severan, she had been restless. It bothered her, because the only other time she had ever been restless in the same way was when she was waiting for her father to die. Then she had had a perfectly sensible reason to be restless. Only after her father’s death had she been able to make her move to take control of the Bank. The old chauvinist fool would never have allowed it. If he’d realized what she’d intended to do, he would never have left her the stock that made it possible for her to do it. This thing with Josh was an entirely different matter. If he proved unsatisfactory he could always be fired—meaning divorced. If a boy toy was really what she required at this stage in her life, she could always find another one. She had picked Josh up in a bar in Corfu. Greece was a good place for things like that.
    She went back to the window, looked down into the empty parking lot, and frowned. She had to get control of herself. She was beginning to think like an Irishwoman, and that could end in blood.
    “Don,” she said, “pay attention. I remember the campaign to have Elizabeth Ann Seton canonized.”
    “And?”
    “And you want to push but you don’t want to push too hard. Pushing too hard holds things up. Like with this business in Yugoslavia. There’s been too much publicity. Rome is dragging its feet.”
    “Having Margaret Finney declared a saint would be very good for the town,” Don said.
    “Yes,” Miriam said, “I agree with you. It would also be very good for the Sisters, and we all owe a great deal to the Sisters. Just—go easy, will you please? Try not to jinx this thing.”
    “Jinx it,” Don repeated. He looked disapproving, with his mouth clamped into a thin line, but he often looked that way when there was nothing wrong with him but a little indigestion. Maybe he had indigestion all the time. He was a holdover from that interim time between her father’s death and her successful coup, and she had only kept him on because he was accommodating. In fact, he seemed to have no sense of what a job description should entail at all. No matter what she asked him to do—no matter how bizarre or how unrelated to work—he did it.
    She went back to her desk again, and sat down again, and rubbed her face with her hands. She was pacing, like the heroine of a bad forties “women’s” picture.
    “On your way out, tell Julie to tell Kevin Hale I’m going out for a couple of hours. We were supposed to have a meeting about that glitch in the computer system we haven’t got straightened out yet.”
    “Are you sure it is a glitch in the computer system? I was thinking about it last week, you know. It just might be that what we’ve got here is a theft.”
    “It certainly looks like a theft,” Miriam sighed, “a really clumsy theft. The mistake sticks out a mile. Still, with the bank examiners coming in on the fifth, we’ve got to keep on top of it. I hate to put off this meeting, but there’s something I have to do. Just tell Julie to tell Kevin I’ll be gone and I’ll get back to him when I can.”
    “All right. But I hear rumors, Miriam. I hear that that mistake can be traced straight back to Ann-Harriet Severan’s desk.”
    “It can’t be traced back to anybody’s desk at the moment.”
    “If you say so. But you’re much too trusting, Miriam. That’s the problem with women in business. They don’t know what kind of absolute moral cesspools most people really are.”
    Absolute moral cesspools, Miriam thought, closing her eyes as Don went out the door. She just wished that most people were absolute moral cesspools. It would make them far more interesting than what they really were, which was not much of anything. It amazed her sometimes, just how wishy-washy and unimpressive people could be.
    She got her thermos of tea out of her bottom left hand drawer and stood up to stuff it into the deep pocket of her cashmere coat. She had a good five minutes or so before she had to leave. She decided to