‘To borrow your expression, that’s a matter of semantics. Will there be anything else?’
‘I do have one last question,’ I asked.
‘Go on.’ He did not look at me, but began writing on a yellow legal pad in that elegant copperplate. Already he had dismissed me in his mind. I had forced him to shout. I had seen the blood on the handkerchief. He wanted me gone from his presence.
‘It concerns the list that you were sent.’
‘List, list.’ A drop of blood fell from his lips and exploded upon the paper. He continued writing, so that blood and ink combined. ‘Again, I know of no such list.’
I ignored him.
‘I was wondering if my name was on it.’
The nib of the pen stopped moving, and Eldritch peered up at me like some old, malicious imp.
‘Worried, Mr Parker?’
‘Interested, Mr Eldritch.’
Eldritch pursed his lips.
‘Let us speculate, then, since you seem so convinced of its existence, and my knowledge of it. If my name were on such a list, I might well be worried, for what could one have done to justify one’s place upon it?’
He wagged the bloodied nib of his pen at me.
‘I think that perhaps you will be meeting my client sooner than you anticipate. I’m sure that the two of you will have a great deal to discuss. If I were you, I would begin preparing my defense now.
‘And perhaps,’ he added, as I rose to go, ‘you might like to think again about that will.’
Eldritch’s secretary was standing at her door when I left her boss’s office, looking anxiously up the stairs, alerted by the earlier shouting. Despite her concern, a cigarette still dangled securely from her lips.
‘What did you do to him?’ she asked.
‘I endangered his blood pressure a little, although I was surprised he had enough blood in him to manage it.’
‘He’s an old man.’
‘But not a nice one.’
She waited for me to come down before she started up the stairs to check on her employer.
‘You’ll get what’s coming to you,’ she said, and she practically hissed the threat. ‘You’ll vanish from the face of the earth, and when they search your home for clues, they’ll find something is missing if they look hard enough: a photograph in a frame, or a pair of cufflinks inherited from your father. It will be an item that had meaning for you, a cherished heirloom, a memory enshrined in a possession, and it will never be found again, because he will have added it to his collection, and we will close and burn the file with your name written on it, just as you too will burn.’
‘You first,’ I said. ‘Your dress is smoldering.’
One of her feet was on a higher step than the other, and her dress had formed a neat basket for the cigarette ash that was burning a hole through the fabric. She brushed at it with her hand, but the damage was already done. It was all relative, as the dress had been horrible to begin with.
‘Let’s talk again soon,’ I said. ‘You take care now.’
She whispered some obscenity, but by then I was already heading for the door. The night before, I had taken the precaution of removing my gun from the locked box under the spare tire in my car, and I was now armed. Before I left Eldritch’s building I took off my jacket, and used it to conceal the gun in my right hand. I kept it there as I walked back to my car, making a slow turn in the middle of the street to make sure that there was nobody at my back. Only when I was driving out of Lynn did I begin to feel even remotely secure, but it was a temporary, compromised thing. My meeting with the old lawyer had unnerved me, but the certainty and venom with which his secretary had spoken had given me the confirmation that I was seeking.
The Collector was in possession of the same list as Epstein.
And my name was on it.