“Seventeen percent? What on earth could she be talking about?” I asked.
Sylvia Wolfe shook her head. “I called her and tried to discuss it with her, but she refused to talk to me. I even tried stopping by to see her, tried to tell her only someone who really is preying on old people would promise her seventeen percent, but she said of course I’d take that line now that it was too late. We wrote and told her we’d reopen her account without any fees if she ever decided she wanted to come back to us. We had to leave it at that.”
“How much did she have in certificates of deposit?” I asked.
Ms. Wolfe shook her head. “You know I can’t tell you that.”
I turned the letter over in my hand, studying it, but it didn’t tell me anything. No one else had written those words, and they didn’t sound as though she’d been under duress, although there was no real way of telling.
“Did she keep a safe-deposit box here?” I asked abruptly.
The loan officers exchanged guarded glances. “No,” Ms. Wolfe said. “I talked to her about it a few times over the years, but she preferred to keep any important documents at home. I didn’t like it, but she wasn’t the kind of person you could tell things to: she pretty much had her mind made up before a conversation started.”
I handed the letter back to Ms. Wolfe. As I thanked her for her help, I wondered where Mrs. Frizell’s private records were. Todd and Chrissie wouldn’t have been trying to pry the information from her if they had them.
“You get what you need, Vic?” Alma interrupted me.
I hunched a shoulder. “It’s something, but I’m baffled. What I’d like to see is her account with U.S. Met, find out what on earth they were offering her that paid that kind of money. And I’d like to know where the title to her house is if she didn’t keep a safe-deposit box.”
“That’s disappeared?” Ms. Wolfe asked, alarm flickering in her pale-brown eyes.
“The kids who’ve taken over her affairs don’t have it: they showed up at the hospital on Thursday with a song and dance about not being able to raise the money to pay Mrs. Frizell’s bill. Of course, she’s at Cook County— they’re not going to throw her‘ out—but since she owns a house they do expect her to pay for her care.”
Ms. Wolfe shook her head. “I don’t know where she’d have it, have the title. But it must be in the house someplace.”
I thought of the great heap of papers still untouched in the secretary. But surely Todd and Chrissie had searched the place thoroughly by now. If the title was there they must have found it. I wondered if Mrs. Hellstrom might know. I thanked the bankers again, and went back into the muggy June day.
Mrs. Hellstrom was in her garden, doing something industrious with a huge bag of peat moss and a hoe. A straw hat shaded her face from the sun while gloves and a smock protected her hands and clothes. She expressed herself as happy to see me, inviting me into the kitchen for iced tea, although she looked wistfully at the yard on her way in.
She laid her gloves and hat carefully on a small shelf just inside the back door. “I was at the hospital last night. They told me you’d been around, that you got Hattie to talk a little more than usual.”
My ministering angel routine apparently was what had earned me this tete-a-tete. I didn’t spoil it by saying that I’d wanted to get Mrs. Frizell to talk about her finances.
Mrs. Hellstrom motioned me to a chair at the spotless Formica table. She pulled a pitcher from the refrigerator and got two amber plastic glasses down from a shelf, the same kind Dick had curled his lip at only a few hours ago. I wondered what he was doing about his coffee-stained shirt and his meetings. Probably he had a spare at the office. Or maybe his secretary raced up to Neiman-Marcus to buy him a new one.
I’m not much of a tea drinker and Mrs. Hellstrom’s stuff clearly had come out of a package, but I sipped some in a sociable way. It had been sweetened with a generous hand. I tried not to make a face as I swallowed.
We talked for a bit about Mrs. Frizell, and some of Mrs. Hellstrom’s memories of her. “Of course, she was my mother’s generation, but Mr. Hellstrom grew up in this house and used to try to play with her son, but he—her son, I mean—wasn’t the kind of boy other kids really liked much. But when you think how strange she is, you can’t really wonder, can you? Although she’s always been a good neighbor, all that junk in her yard and those dogs notwithstanding.‘’