CHAPTER ONE

     If he’d known what was going to happen, he wouldn’t have gotten up that morning. He’d have stayed in bed with the one red blanket Ellie left. With the doors locked and the phones unplugged. Or maybe he’d have risked slipping outside just long enough to stick a quarantine sign—does lunacy count as a contagious disease? —into the patch of ivy fighting a losing battle with the dandelion weeds by the front steps to make sure no one came near him. No one.
     But he didn’t. Luke Skye Walker was only human and hindsight was better left to the gods. Besides he was a man of action. Hadn’t he dealt successfully with the consequences of his Hollywood space saga name all of his relatively short life? Yes, yes, his parents were Star Wars groupies, and in their usual feckless exuberance had saddled their firstborn with this ridiculous moniker, although, in their defense, his mother’s maiden name was Schuyler. In his defense, how many times can a little kid ignore the shouts of “May THE FORCE be with you”? Or laugh at still another puerile R2D2 imitation? Or have his parents referred to as Mr. and Mrs. Darth Vader before he hits back? Karate, boxing, and fencing lessons were his parents’ logical solution for his endless school yard fights. By age seven, Skye had already realized his parents weren’t logical, but the lessons worked. They focused his youthful energies, and gave him an edge when it came time for him to compete in sports. Football, soccer, lacrosse, baseball, tennis, you name it—all seemed to come naturally to him. As a three-sport varsity athlete in high school, he got the last laugh. And the nickname: “The Force.” Sure, then they all wanted “The Force” to be with them, sucked up to him, but by then he didn’t care what others thought. A lesson almost as valuable as the discipline he’d gained from years of punching and lunging and kicking. And winning.
     He’d dropped the “Luke” in high school, insisting on being called “Skye.” It stuck. Except for his family, of course. During his freshman year at Princeton, he fooled around with styling himself L.S. Walker. He felt it carried more weight than Skye. After all, he was in F. Scott territory now and a fledgling English major to boot. Along with hundreds of his classmates, he’d nourished inchoate literary aspirations in those innocent early days. L.S. Walker would look cool on a book jacket. Just look at T.S. Elliot and e.e. cummings. The B’s on his essays didn’t deter him. He was a man with a vision. L.S. Walker, Pulitzer Prize hopeful. Only when his mailbox started to overflow with letters, university notices, and a colorful array of promotional flyers addressed to one “Ellis Walker” did he question his choice of a new name. He simmered over the incompetence of the campus post office. What idiot could confuse L.S. with Ellis? Who’s this Ellis Walker anyway? He’d check him out, hand over his recent mailings—he’d already trashed the guy’s junk mail—and straighten out the mix up.
     And that’s when he reverted to being called Skye once more, for Ellis Walker turned out to be female, a freshman from Chagrin Falls, Ohio with horn rimmed glasses and a long blonde pony tail and a bossy manner, and she immediately put him in his place. Ellie was a force unto herself that no one, least of all Skye, could ever control. It didn’t hurt that she had the most dazzling smile, when she chose to display it, and long legs and well, there was no one like Ellie. By his junior year, Skye had switched to Political Science, and it was Ellis Walker, not L.S. Walker, who would probably earn a Pulitzer. She nailed an internship at The Washington Post after graduation. He followed her to D.C.
     Keep an eye on her, he’d decided at the time, although Ellie undoubtedly believed it was Skye who needed watching. Nothing escaped her laser-like powers. Despite the see-saw pattern of their relationship, it was the one rut that Skye didn’t want to break out of, nor explore too deeply. Not yet. So he’d enrolled in law school, basically to hang out with Ellie and discover what’s what.
     At law school, after listening to Skye’s roundabout explication of some obscure tax code, one drone-voiced professor couldn’t resist the lure of George Lucas’ cinematic creation in the conclusion of his stinging critique: “I think, Mr. Luke Skye Walker, that the nocturnal challenges of your galactic adventures in saving The Empire have perhaps depleted your mental resources in understanding the more mundane aspects of our earthly duties, such as going to the law library and actually reading the assigned text.” He got part of it right, anyway. Skye wasn’t cut out to be a lawyer. He finished Georgetown in the lower half of his law class and planned never to open another law book again.
     He’d spent the next few years fiddling around with a variety of dead end jobs. Gofer in a startup dotcom, fraudulent claims investigator for a second rate insurance company, trainee for a brokerage firm; he even moonlighted in his evening hours playing the piano—anything from Rachmaninoff to Ray Charles—in the atrium of  Bloomingdale’s. The only job prospect that challenged him in a way so that he actually looked forward to going to work was as a part time lacrosse coach at his old prep school near the Washington Cathedral. But that was seasonal.
     Eventually Skye had managed to turn his unfortunate name to his advantage and come up with an alternative career. As of last month, he had set up his own one-man investigation firm. Now he was officially Luke Skye Walker, Inc., The Best Private Investigator in the Galaxy. Ellie hadn’t raised so much as an eyebrow when he’d shown her the logo printed on his business cards: May THE FORCE be with you!
     True, she’d tried to suppress a giggle, but that same evening she had produced a magnum of Veuve Clicquot—on her salary? The stuff cost a ton. Maybe she had some dirt on the liquor store guy or maybe just winked at him—to celebrate his venture.
     “How’d I ever find you?” she asked.
     “You like trouble,” he’d answered.
     “That I do, that I do.  But why do I put up with you?”
     “You love trouble?”
     “Bingo!” she squinted with her right eye and made a gesture with her hand as if to shoot an imaginary pistol at him.
     Skye wasn’t fooled with this type of banter, though. He knew Ellie too well. She was going to be supportive of his new career, because she was going to bend it to her advantage. Bend him, push him, pummel him, bully him, and torture him with kisses if necessary if she thought he was on to something that could lead to a hot story. They didn’t call her the human dynamo for nothing in the newsroom. He looked forward to the kissing part. And the other stuff he could handle, he’d thought, because that was just Ellie’s way. He hadn’t counted on coming up against the Senator’s threats—“Stay the Hell out the Senate’s business, boy!”—nor meeting Digger, a hulk with an Arnold Schwartzenegger-like physique and the grimace of a demented shark, nor all the other craziness that erupted in short disorder from his first case. Which he solved, he’d reminded Ellie last night, but she wasn’t buying any of that, although she’d whistled with joy a mere ten days ago when he’d shown her the fat paycheck he’d earned.
     It was in the midst of this initial case that Douglas Beidermann, aka Digger, had descended on him like the locust in some cautionary Biblical tale, almost getting them killed in a high speed shootout on the Beltway and wreaking havoc on Skye’s nervous system. But unlike the ravenous pests who had the common sense to fly off when they’d devoured all the crops, Digger still lurked around, hoping to scrounge another bite, somehow, somewhere. When he wasn’t pumping iron, he took to dropping by Skye’s brownstone in a cul-de-sac off Kalorama Road in the Adams Morgan section of DC, chomping his way through take-out pizza and littering the floor with empty cans of Diet Dr. Pepper. “Dude” and “whatever”—intoned in surprisingly flexible and varied sound registers—formed the backbone of his vocabulary, and you’d never guess he was a CalTech dropout with an IQ rivaling that of Einstein. He belonged to the clandestine ring of hackers who got their jollies penetrating the secrets behind the supposedly invincible firewalls of government and business computer installations. He’d seen Skye’s business card in the local Starbucks and “volunteered” to freelance for him. Since then, he’d pretty much appointed himself Skye’s unofficial bodyguard. Ellie’s hardened attitude stemmed partly from the fact that Digger seemed unable to restrict his sleuthing to computers and partly from the Senator’s profuse gratitude.
     The Senator was his Uncle Ned, who had gone from actively opposing his nephew’s pursuit of the gangland style killing of a young intern on the Hill to actively bragging about Skye’s successful venture into crime detection. The latter had led to Skye’s present predicament. A hot new client. Samantha Everest, the daughter of one of Uncle Ned’s former law partners in Baltimore. Very Hot. “V” as in voluptuously hot. A missing fiancé—Samantha’s (the guy must be seriously blind or nuts). A couple of  messages left on Skye’s answering machine promising to have his balls cut off and displayed on the White House lawn if he continued to have any more interaction with Ms. Everest. A rock hurled threw an upper pane of the bay window in his ground floor “office” (in its former life it was called the living room and its most valuable possession remained the Steinway, courtesy of his musical mother, although Digger believed that Skye’s top-of-the-line Dell computer set up had priority in that category). And an angry Ellie. “A” as in ass-kicking mad.
     She’d hung that little bitty red blanket over his alarm clock this morning while he was still trying to sleep off the effects of one too many brewskis. A tattered quilted square, with a yellow duck stitched in satin, was all that was left of Ellie’s baby blanket. She kept it on hand for emergencies. He knew what it signified. STOP. DO NOT PASS GO OR COLLECT $200.
     He groaned and rolled over, trying to count how many beers he’d consumed. His head throbbed. He grabbed the damn blanket to block out the sunlight streaming through the slats of the louvered shutters. The denuded digital clock blinked 11:07, May 22. He closed his eyes. Another half hour, then he’d take a shower. The imprint of the green digital display flickered behind his eyeballs, triggering vague waves of unease in his subconscious which refused to go away. Skye lifted the corner of the blanket, opened one eye, and rechecked the clock: 11:08, May 22. Gradually a realization more ominous than the “don’t you dare leave this house before I get back” signal of the red blanket surfaced through his hangover-induced grogginess, spewing forth a whole new set of unforeseen complications for the day. May 22! Ellie’s birthday! And oh sweet Jesus, he hadn’t bought her anything. She’d kill him for sure if she found out he ignored her warning and sneaked out. But she’d kill him just the same if there was no birthday goodie. The lady or the tiger? The story of his life with Ellie.
     “What the fuck,” he said out loud, and leapt out of bed. He’d go for broke. Ellie’s red blanket wasn’t going to stop him. Not this time. He’d drive over to the mall at Tyson’s Corner, scout out Saks and Neiman’s, hope he’d find a salesgirl there who’d know what a Marc Jacobs clutch was, charge it to his Visa and pray it wouldn’t be returned to him cut into plastic bits, and then hightail it to Falls Village, a few towns over, where he’d have a second little conversation with Samantha, this time on her home turf. Like the “real” Luke Skywalker, he’d strike back, hard and fast.

     Twenty minutes later, freshly shaved and showered and dressed in his usual khakis and button-down shirt, Skye bounded downstairs two steps at time, pocketing his cell phone with one hand while running a comb through his wet hair with the other. He hummed an old Harold Arlen tune. A good sign. In one continuous motion, he turned on the computer, clicked open the Samantha Everest file to get her address, pointed the mouse on the print icon. While the printer was coughing up the printout, he headed for the kitchen at the rear of his townhouse, grabbed the last doughnut from yesterday’s box of Krispie Kremes atop the refrigerator, adroitly stepping over a congealed puddle of some unidentifiable substance. Soy sauce? Tabasco? Uttering the “F” word three times, he surveyed the scene from last night’s debauchery, and made a mental note to clean up the beer cans and kitchen floor as soon as he got back, and raced back to the living room.
     Skye folded the printout into his wallet, then took a generous bite of the doughnut—coconut cream, his favorite. Nothing like a sugar rush to put a man on top of his game. He polished off the doughnut, dusted the sugar off his hands, and reached for his car keys resting on the piano keys. Removing them, he couldn’t resist thumping a few bars of “When the Saints Go Marching In”, belting out the lyrics in his Louis Armstrong imitation. Whooey! Another day, another dollar, he thought as he stepped out the front door and stooped to pick up The Washington Post.
     And there it was—on the bottom half of the creased front page—the one-inch head line that for a nanosecond stopped his heart: Missing NY Banker Pierpont Redding Found Drowned in Potomac. Found drowned? Who was the copyeditor who let that stupid rhyme slip by? Ellie’d never allow such garbage. He shook his head to clear his mind of Ellie’s voice. Even when she wasn’t there, she was there.
     Concentrate, man, concentrate. Redding was Samantha’s fiancé. No longer missing, but dead. He scanned the article, his pulse racing. Redding’s bloated body had been discovered by a kayaker navigating the treacherous shoals of the river as it wended its way through Great Falls National Parkland. It’d been trapped between some rocks and saplings. Police identified the body before midnight. “Foul play” has not been ruled out. He pondered, now what? He’d have to talk to Samantha asap. Find out if he still had a client, for God’s sake, since technically Redding was no longer missing.
     Walking towards his parked car, he was too busy punching numbers into his cell phone to hear the footsteps closing in on him. An arm the size of a couple of meat slabs landed on his left shoulder. Skye spun around to face the attacker, his leg poised to drop kick the bastard. Just when he thought his day couldn’t go any further south, it plummeted all the way to Antarctica. Digger!
     “Dude! What’s happening?”

CHAPTER TWO

      The newsroom at The D.C. Sentinel was buzzing. Phones ringing, interns scurrying around with cardboard trays of coffee, reporters tapping frantically on computers or gossiping with their neighbors, research assistants scanning the net with staccato-like precision, copy editors yelling—the daily cacophony of high-decibel sounds on which Ellie Walker thrived. But today it produced no surge of adrenaline or sense of purpose. In fact, every individual sound grated on her as if she were enduring some weird aural version of Chinese water torture. Her story on the plight of illegal immigrants from Brazil was almost wrapped up. Yesterday she thought it was a strong piece, now it failed to hold her attention. She was pissed. At Skye, at her editor MacEvoy, at Samantha Everest, at the world. But mostly at herself.
     Well, a girl can’t be charming and upbeat all the time, she rationalized. Admit it, she’d been a wee bit unfair to Skye yesterday, getting him drunk (she matched each beer he had with flavored sparkling water), then draping the red blanket over his alarm clock after he conked out upstairs. Like the scarlet cape used by a matador to flaunt his prowess and manipulate el toro, the red blanket (or what was left of it) was Ellie’s personal calling card whenever she felt Skye had crossed the line and was about to put himself into physical jeopardy. His stubborn refusal to report last night’s rock-throwing incident to the police on top of the menacing phone calls had left her no choice. Poor thing. But really, he could behave like such a naive ass. Oblivious of danger, oblivious of how attractive other women found him. Face it, he was studly, but in a nice way, with old-fashioned manners and an endearing optimism that softened his blond, blue-eyed frat boy exterior. Perhaps his quasi-southern upbringing in the D. C. environment accounted for his politeness and Don Quixote complex.
     When Ellie first arrived in D.C., she had been surprised how deep the courtly customs and gentile sensibility of what she had presumed was a long vanished antebellum South still flowed through the social fabric of the nation’s capitol. While the languidly drawn out vowels and infallible courteousness of the natives could be seductive, it sometimes made it damn difficult for an outsider like herself to tell the difference between the good guys and the bad guys. In Foggy Bottom, corruption and confabulation oozed forth in compatible predictability right along with chivalry and shoo fly pie.
     The news captions from CNN, running silently across the TV monitors positioned throughout the pressroom, reminded her why she was so pissed in the first place. As if she needed reminding. The death of Pierpont Redding was the morning’s breaking headlines on the national scene, as far as Ellie was concerned. Redding was a high profile banker, one of the gurus of mergers and acquisitions, who had rivaled Donald Trump in arrogance and self-promotion, if not in net worth, and who had just ended his larger than life existence face down among the mud, fish, and reeds of the Potomac. He’d also played polo, collected priceless porcelain, sat on the board of the Metropolitan Opera, and even once squired Princess Di around London’s trendiest clubs.
     Well, lah di dah, thought Ellie. A Renaissance man for this century’s Robber Barons. It figures. Rumors about his being a possible target of SEC investigations during PRC International’s attempts at a hostile takeover of Zykon Corp. had been swirling around Wall Street for months. How many new enemies had that move created for Redding? Or had our billionaire equestrian been engaged in fiddling with PRC’s spread sheets a` la Enron? So many delicious possibilities to contemplate.
     Even more intriguing to Ellie was Redding’s connection to Samantha, the uber slut of the horsy set. Was it coincidence or serendipity that Samantha had just hired Skye to locate her peripatetic fiancé? Redding had fallen off Samantha’s radar screen about a week ago. That must have taken some maneuvering, she mused. The Samantha angle could be a potential lead to the banker’s demise. A lead she could cash in on.
     She wanted in on the Redding story. She wanted more than in, she wanted the sole byline. And she deserved it, by golly. And she was the only one in the newsroom who had the perfect source to feed her information, to keep her up to date on every move the police or anyone connected with the investigation made—Skye. A bona fide, pillow-talking “in.” All she had to do was swallow her pride, phone him and apologize. He was probably still sleeping off the Heinekens, sleeping like the innocent babe he was, blissfully unaware of the headlines. Could she concede defeat so easily? Maybe, she’d suggest that his birthday gift to her could be his solemn promise to go fifty-fifty with her on investigating the case? (It’d save him a Hell of a lot of money, and he needed every red cent for his insane enterprise to succeed.) Then tell MacEvoy that he had to give her the byline on this one. It could work.
     Coming out of her reveries, she drummed on the keyboard. Just finish the damn article, come on, come on, one more paragraph, then schmooze Mac, wake Skye… Her cell beeped.
     “Ellis Peters,” she answered.
     “Persimmon.  Your space muffin got you the persimmon baby.”
     “Persimmon?  Claire, is that you?”
     “Who else be calling you about something as earthshaking as a gen-u-ine, persimmon-colored, hand-tooled leather, Marc Jacobs clutch purse half the size of your skinny butt? Persimmon is Marc’s answer to Louis’ geranium. Same color. It’s this year’s must-have shade. What normal people call red. But you and I know better, girlfriend.”
     “We sure do, we sure do. I adore the persimmon one.”
     “Girl, you better hold on to him.  He’s not only easy on the old eyeballs, he didn’t even take a peek at the price tag, he’s that far gone on you. Just forked over the plastic and raced out of here like the Devil himself was chasing him.”
     Claire Jackson worked as a sales woman at the Neiman’s in Tyson’s Corner. She and Ellie had bonded over the designer handbag counter the summer of Ellie’s internship at The Post. Ellie hadn’t any extra money left over from her tight budget to buy any of the pocketbooks enshrined in glass cases like museum pieces, but she could look, and she did. Marc Jacobs, Louis Vuitton, Kate Spade, and, of course Hermes with its signature Kelly bag, were her current “crushes.” Claire, with a bank balance considerably less than Ellie’s, shared her pocketbook passion, as well as her shoe thing. As Claire put it, “Shoes and purses go together like bread and butter, and they got zero calories.”
     Journalism didn’t pay as much as the investment banks and brokerage houses where many of her Princeton pals with their prestigious MBA’s worked, but it paid enough for Ellie to put a down payment on a Georgetown studio, to meet the monthly payments for her Mini Cooper, and to indulge in her taste for expensive shoes and pocketbooks. One man’s poison, blah, blah, blah, she’d excuse this materialistic streak in her otherwise minimalist lifestyle. Journalism occupied most of her thoughts. And now her journalistic instincts smelled a rat. Why had Skye been in such a hurry?
     “Claire, that’s great and all. He’s a sweetie, all right.” A sneaky sweetie who raced out of Neiman’s as if the Devil herself were chasing him would be more accurate. Ellie being the Devil. “But just tell me one thing. When exactly did Skye purchase this persimmon wonder?”
     “ ‘Bout ten minutes ago. I called you as soon as I could get rid of that white-haired biddy eying a Prada saddle bag. I knew it was too youthful for her, but did she listen? Nah, she touched every bit of that bag as if she was planning to adopt it or something before she bought a Fendi. And may God forgive me, but that Fendi was as ugly as mud, the only ugly Fendi…”
     “Claire, sorry to interrupt, but you said ten minutes ago? As in, ten minutes ago today?” Damn Judas, she swore to herself. While she’d been gearing up to sing mea culpa to Skye, he’d already flown the coop.
     “What’s come over you, girl? Yeah, like I told you. Ten minutes ago. Him and Conan.”
     “Conan? Who’s Conan?”
     “You got me there. Your space muffin didn’t seem to have time for any of the niceties that I know his momma taught him, so he never introduced us. Guy’s built just like that Conan the barbarian character in the movies, ‘cept  he was wearing a baggy gray sweat suit and one of them Rasta rags ‘round his big head. Not the type to shop at Needless Markup, that’s for sure. Seems like I’ve seen that film with Darrell a thousand times on TV. He never tires of it, that boy.”
     Digger! Another Judas! This meant Skye’s already knee-deep in the Redding case and he’s roped Digger in to ride shotgun.
     “Thanks Claire, I owe you. I’ll call you real soon. I think I have a pretty good idea who Conan is and what the boys are up to. Gotta run. And Claire? Give Darrell and Kimberleigh a big hug for me.”
     “I sure will. They’re both sweet on you too.”
     Ellie snapped her cell phone shut. Darrell and Kimberleigh were Claire’s sister’s kids, who lived on and off with Claire in her modest row house in the SW section of D.C. Ellie had discerned a spunkiness in fourteen-year old Kimberleigh— alternatively sassy and shy—that she identified with, and she had secretly decided to work her ass off to get the kid into Princeton. With time and a little tinkering of the universe she knew she could pull it off. Her immediate problem was how on earth was she going to pull off getting assigned to the Redding story and head Skye off at the proverbial pass?
     “Next time I’ll just stuff a red rag into his mouth and tie him up to the bedpost,” Ellie spoke loud enough for several heads to glance in her direction, but spotting the intensity of her steely gaze, they averted their eyes and returned to their own woes. She had finished her article in five minutes flat, intermittently speed dialing Luke, who hadn’t picked up his cell. He must be screening his calls. Damn the person who invented caller ID.
     “Boyfriend trouble again, Walker?” Finnegan Aspinwall asked, his hand automatically covering up the mouthpiece of the telephone that was glued to his ear most of his working day. He alone in the news room couldn’t resist needling Ellie whenever the chance arose. Swiveling his chair to lean across their adjacent desks close enough for Ellie to catch a whiff of his aftershave lotion and to count the navy blue dots in his pink Hermes tie that few reporters could afford, he added in a conspiratorial whisper, “Didn’t know you were into S and M. You can tie me up anytime, any place. And I swear I won’t tell anyone.”
     “Dream on, Finn. I think you’ve been watching too many Sex and the City episodes. You really should mix it up a little, try the Home Shopping channel and widen your testosterone-driven horizons.”
     “Ouch. No fair hitting below the belt, Lois Lane. I’m just a poor reporter trying to mind your business. What’s the matter today? Your super hero playing hard to get?  The partnership of Walker and Walker, Inc. undergoing an emotional recession? Come on, sit on my lap and share your troubles with Uncle Finn.” He patted the knees of his perfectly pressed Ermenegildo Zegna trousers and wiggled his eyebrows in an exaggerated lecherous gesture.
     Ellie smiled in spite of her pissy mood. Like Ellie, Finn Aspinwall was running on the fast track, one of the dozen or so young hot shot reporters in D.C. hoping to become the next Bob Woodward or Carl Bernstein. In the dog-eat-dog standards of the news media, these Young Turks were expected to be fierce competitors, which they were, yet they had managed to form a tight circle, companionable enough to be in each others’ pockets most of the time, drinking together, commiserating over lost opportunities and loves, toasting their success stories and conquests, teasing, cajoling—and spying on each other, the better to stay one step ahead of the pack, Ellie cautioned herself in those rare moments of meanness that would sometimes overtake her. Maybe not meanness, just plain old realistic calculation, part of every reporter’s defense mechanism.
     Unlike Ellie, Finn was far from being poor, in the financial sense. The Aspinwall fortune, built from the obscene profits of the railroad industry in the nineteenth century, made sure of that. Cushioned against the necessity of ever having to save up for a rainy day, Finn cultivated an aura of aristocratic nonchalance and decadence so extreme that it bordered on parody. From their internships days at The Post Ellie, however, had quickly recognized that Finn, despite his outrageous poses, was no epicene relic stumbling out of the pages of a Wodehouse novel, but shrewd and single-minded as a terrier harrying at the heels of his prey when he latched onto a story. Beware the fool who underestimated him. Finn had decided early on in their rival relationship that they were alike in their external plumage. Finn’s foppish manner and Ellie’s corn-fed wholesome Mid West looks were weapons to exploit the unwary. Ellie hated to concede that he might have a point.
     Of course, Finn was a natural gossip, and maybe he could give her some background on Redding that could anchor her talk with Mac.
     “Finn, what do you know about Pierpont Redding?”
     “I assume you mean aside from the fact that he’s dead and his chances of withstanding St. Peter’s scrutiny and entering the Pearly Gates into heaven are extremely slim?”
     “Yeah, aside from the obvious.”
     “Why, my dear Ellis, do you want to know?”
     “Curious, plain curious.”
     “You’ve never been plain anything, Ellie. Curious, my left foot. What are you really after?”
     “Okay, here’s the deal. Skye’s new client is Redding’s fiancé, so I’m on a little fishing expedition for him.” And a bigger one for herself, but she wasn’t going to reveal that little goodie yet, unless he forced her hand.
     “Well, someone’s been busy with something more than salacious exercises in the secret bedroom, I see. Angling Mac for the Redding assignment already, sweetheart?”
     “Finn, seriously.”
     “Seriously? Ellis, it’s too early in the morning for me to be serious, but now that you’re opening up to Uncle Finn, maybe I can pass a few choice morsels your way. How would I describe Redding? In a nutshell, his character could be reduced to the three B’s, and I don’t mean Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms, either. He made big bucks, had big balls, and was a big bully. Aside from that, what’s left? He was just another Horatio Alger figure on Wall Street, a common enough rags to riches story in that crowd, who made a lot of people very rich in PRC stock, including himself, and then  turned his greedy eyes to a more rarefied form of greener pastures. He wanted to be accepted into “society,” not realizing, silly misguided man, that it no longer exists. At least in the way he thought it did. You know, Society with a capital ‘S’ as measured by the collected works of Edith Wharton?”
     Ellie rolled her eyes. “Gotcha. You can skip the lecture on the glories of the Knickerbocker Club and the cotillions at the Astor mansion and the misguided notions of us lumpenproletariat and cut to the chase.”
     “Lumpenproletariat? Ellis, you really should update your vocabulary. That’s so passé. We’re living in a post-Marxist age now. Nevertheless, I’ll ignore your crude interjection and continue my little tale, shall I? In knocking on its doors, the doors of society as he perceived it, that is, Redding became just another vulgar arriviste with tedious pretensions, extravagant yet dubious taste in art, and a proclivity to cheat on his wives, which is why he had so many of them. Still, each wife, while attempting to exhaust his endless resources in her divorce proceedings, lifted him up a little higher on the ladder to his putative shangri la, what that old bore Proust referred to as tout le monde.”
     Finn paused to adjust his cufflinks with fastidious care before continuing his recitation. “In fairness to the deceased, I must point out, that he had at least one praiseworthy quality. He was a generous patron of numerous cultural institutions, all of which will be waiting with bated breath to learn to what degree their precious organization will be remembered in his will. End of story. Amen.”
     He folded his hands primly and bowed his angular, patrician head in mock humility for several long seconds.
     “And?” There had to be something more. Finn was having way too much fun.
     He lifted his head, arched one dark eyebrow, and said, “Oh, yes, there’s a tiny post script you might be interested in.”
     Ellie narrowed her eyes. Here it comes, she thought, he’s going to drop the other shoe. It better be good.
     “His last wife was my niece Cecilia’s godmother. Avery Cushing, one of my sister’s pals from Choate. A fabulous backhand, as I recall. She met Redding at a gallery opening in New York. Come to think of it, it was her gallery. Somewhere in SoHo—or not, maybe it’s NoHo? NoLo? Anyhow, it doesn’t matter, it’s on a street that’s just gritty enough to be considered trendy. Short courtship, long divorce. However tenuous their marriage was, Redding always acted like little Cecilia’s fairy godfather. Plied her with all kinds of toys and trinkets. Hmm, does that mean Redding and I can be construed to be step relatives if only under the auspices of the Episcopal Church?” He flashed a wicked grin at her, and tilted his chair as far back as it could go and twirled an imaginary cigar.
     “Wait, you knew him personally?” Although he had caught her off guard with this revelation, her mind was already whirling. This was better than good.
     He nodded.
     “No fair, you were holding out on me. Finnegan Aspinwall, I can’t decide if you’re a rat or an angel!”
     “Whether I’m a rat or an angel is beside the point. The question is: am I in or out? And who took the first step in holding out on Uncle Finn? Do we pool our not-so paltry, privileged sources, such as they are, and split the story fifty-fifty? Or do I race you to the finish line?”
     “God, you can be such a ball breaker, Finn.”
     “I only wish,” he sighed theatrically. Ellie jumped out of her chair and proceeded to pound his arms in mini punches, increasing the pressure until he cried out laughing, “Ouch, that hurts, stop it, Walker, down girl, down. You’re wrinkling my new duds. In or out?”
     “What do you think?” She put her hands on her hips and tipped her head to one side.
     “Now you’re behaving like the sweet reasonable Lois Lane I know and love. Shall we waltz over and take a bite out of the Big Mac now?”
     Finn stood up, looking in his navy, pin striped, silk gabardine suit and slicked back hair the picture of elegance, and made a sweeping gesture for Ellie to step ahead of him. She did, taking extra long strides as they headed single file towards MacEvoy’s office. With each forceful click of her Prada heels across the tiled floor, her black stretch mini skirt revealed to great advantage both her legs clad in black tights and her shapely derriere, much to Finn’s amusement.
     “Ah Walker, what a pair we make. Tracy and Hepburn would be jealous.”
     “Oh, give it a rest. And stop staring at my ass.” But she felt a surge of energy familiar to every reporter about to chase a big story down.
     “I’ve always speculated you had eyes in the back of your head.”