“No, thank you.”
“Indiana limestone fa?ade, marble floors. Hired a New York outfit to design it. Mowbray and Uffinger?” He settles himself in the chair behind the desk and lifts his eyebrows, as if he expects me to know the architects personally. I don’t reply—what is there to say, really?—and he raises one hand to cough gently into his fist. His gaze darts to Evelyn, who’s arranging herself on my lap, and back to me. “I’m terribly sorry for your loss, of course. Mr. Fitzwilliam was one of my favorite customers.”
“Oh, I’m sure he was.”
“A real shock. Terrible accident. Young fellow like that, in the prime of life.” Shakes his head. Steeples his fingers. “I hope you’ve found the papers are all in order? Accounts all shipshape? Anything more I can do for you?”
You know, for all his banker-statesman airs, Mr. Edward Romfh doesn’t look as if he’s much older than Simon himself. Forty, forty-five at the most. His brown hair parts straight down the middle, lustrous with some sort of invincible pomade, and his healthy Florida sportsman’s tan sets off a pair of clear, bright eyes. He smells of laundry starch and leather: the kind of man who regards you from behind round, wire-rimmed spectacles as if he’s calculating your precise value in dollars and cents, down to the last copper penny. As if he knows what you’re going to say, even before you do.
Evelyn wriggles in my arms. I allow her to slide free and dart for the window, where you can see all ten stories of the new First National Bank of Miami Building, a few blocks away and nearly complete, as it scrapes the hazy sky. The fans stir the hair at my nape and temples. I’m wearing one of Clara’s hats, which are much smarter than mine, close and brimless like a cap. Isn’t it funny, how a smart new hat gives you moral strength? I cross my legs and say crisply—surprising even myself with the backbone in my voice—“I just want to learn more about my husband’s time here in Florida, Mr. Romfh. His—the fire was so sudden, you know. I never had the chance to come down and see the business firsthand. His life here.”
“Yes. Well. You’ll forgive me, Mrs. Fitzwilliam, but down here in Miami, we frankly didn’t know he had a wife to begin with. Not until I heard from that fellow up in Cocoa. His lawyer.”
“Mr. Burnside.”
“That’s the one.”
Again, the expression of male expectation. I suppose he wants to know more—why I didn’t live here in Florida with my lawful husband, why I’ve only journeyed south now that he’s dead. Whether I loved my husband. Whether my husband loved me. I suppose you’d have to be made of stone not to wonder these things, and bankers make it their business to know as much as possible about their clients, don’t they? To learn every detail—however everyday and inconsequential—that might affect a man’s willingness and ability to repay his creditors.
Well, let him wonder.
“Mr. Burnside’s been very kind, of course,” I say, “but he’s the kind of man who thinks that women aren’t capable of understanding business matters.”
“Well!”
“Yes. Would you believe it? But he’s older, you know. You have to make allowances for the prejudices of an earlier generation. I’m sure he means well.”
“I’m sure he does, though in all truth—”
I wrap my hands around the ends of the chair arms and lean forward over my crossed knees. “But you, Mr. Romfh. You strike me as a much keener sort of man. A modern man. The kind of man who really comprehends women. Who respects our native intelligence, to say nothing of our peculiar intuition.”
“Well. Yes, of course.”
“I’m sure I can rely on you to treat me as a human being of reasonable acumen. Capable of understanding a figure or two.” Here I smile, nice and warm. Conspiratorial. To my right, Evelyn’s lost interest in the view of the new bank building and skips across a dark Oriental rug to the windows on the other side. “Do you know how we met, Mr. Romfh? Mr. Fitzwilliam and me? I was driving ambulances for the American Red Cross in France. Why, if you’ve got a Model T Ford outside, Mr. Romfh, I’ll bet I can take the engine apart and put it back together again, all without dirtying my gloves.” I hold up my hands, clad in white cotton.
And my stars, if that doesn’t do the trick. Mr. Romfh unsteeples his thick hands and draws his chair closer to the desk. He reaches for a drawer and asks if I mind if he smokes. I say of course not. And he takes out a cigar—a cigar, mind you!—and lights it up slowly, puff puff puff, until they’re both content, man and cigar, smoking quietly in that hot Miami room, while the electric fans suck the fog upward in mighty drafts.
“What do you want to know, Mrs. Fitzwilliam?” he asks.
By the time I return to the Flamingo Hotel and arrange the Packard in the lot outside, under the shade of a cocoanut palm, it’s eleven o’clock in the morning and the golfers are trudging indoors, sweating and flushed.
“There you are!” says Clara, rising from the bed, fully dressed and holding a crisp new novel, which she tosses on the pillow behind her. The room is already made up, though a breakfast tray lingers untidily on the desk, covered by a careless napkin. “Where on earth have you been?”
“Just to meet with Simon’s bankers.”
“You might have woken me first.”
“You looked so peaceful. What have you been reading?”
“A detective story. Too clever. What did the bankers say?”
I remove the hat and set it on the desk, next to the tray, while Evelyn dashes into her room. The scent of coffee and toast lingers in the air, and I find I’m rather hungry. “What I expected, more or less. Despite the bank’s known reluctance to invest in anything but the soundest of ventures, Simon managed to persuade Mr. Romfh to extend him over a hundred thousand dollars in credit, in the form of a mortgage on Maitland Plantation.”
“My goodness! A hundred thousand dollars! It sounds like a very great deal of money. What’s that in pounds sterling?”
“About twenty or thirty thousand, more or less.”
Clara whistles low and moves across the room to examine her reflection in the mirror. Nudging this, tidying that. “I suppose I’m not surprised. He had a knack for that sort of thing. Convincing people to do impossible things for him. I doubt the plantation is worth a tenth of that. What do you think he did with all the money?”
I angle my neck to peer through the connecting door, where I can just glimpse Evelyn on the rug in the middle of the room, scribbling on a piece of paper.
“I’ll have to look at the accounts, to be sure. But I presume he used it to rebuild the hotel and shipping business. The house on the beach.”
“His little empire.”
“Yes. But that’s not the strange part, you see. It seems the whole thing’s been paid off in full.”
“Paid off! By who?”
“Mr. Romfh wouldn’t tell me that. Just the name of the bank that issued payment, and that it came in February, soon after Simon’s death.”