Bitter Truth by William Lashner Read Free Book Online

banking at First Mercantile,” said James, just before I heard the click of the glass door’s lock behind me.

5

    D RIVING BACK into town on the Schuylkill Expressway I wasn’t fighting my way through the left lanes. I stayed, instead, in the safe slow right and let the buzz of the aggressive traffic slide by. When a white convertible elbowed into my lane, inches from my bumper, as it sped to pass a truck in the center, I didn’t so much as tap my horn. I was too busy thinking. One woman was dead, from suicide or murder, I wasn’t sure yet which, another was paying me ten thousand dollars to find out, and now, most surprisingly, they both seemed to be Reddmans.
    We all know Reddman Foods, we’ve been consuming its pressure-flavored pickles since we were kids — sweet pickles, sour pickles, kosher dill pickles, fine pickled gherkins. The green and red pickle jar with the founder’s stern picture above the name is an icon and the Reddman Pickle has taken its place in the pantheon of American products, alongside Heinz Ketchup and Kellogg’s cereal and the Ford motor car and Campbell’s soup. The brand names become trademarks, so we forget that there are families behind the names, families whose wealth grows ever more obscene whenever we throw ketchup on the burger, shake out a bowl of cereal, buy ourselves a fragrant new automobile. Or snap a garlic pickle between our teeth. And like Henry Ford and Henry John Heinz and Andrew Carnegie, Claudius Reddman was one of the great men of America’s industrial past, earning his fortune in business and his reputation in philanthropy. The Reddman Library at the University of Pennsylvania. The Reddman Wing of the Philadelphia Art Museum. The Reddman Foundation with its prestigious and lucrative Claudius Reddman grants for the most accomplished artists and writers and scholars.
    So, it was a Reddman who had pointed a gun at me and then begged me for help, an heir to the great pickle fortune. Why hadn’t she told me? Why had she wanted me to think her only a poverty-struck little liar? Well, maybe she was a little liar, but a liar with money was something else again. And I did like that smile.
    “What would you do if you were suddenly stinkingly rich?” I asked Beth.
    “I don’t know, it never crossed my mind.”
    “Liar,” I said. “Of course it crossed your mind. It crosses every American mind. It is our joint national fantasy, the communal American wishing for a fortune that is the very engine of our economic growth.”
    “Well, when the lottery was at sixty-six million I admit I bought a ticket.”
    “Only one?”
    “All right, ten.”
    “And what would you have done with all that money?”
    “I sort of fantasized about starting a foundation to help public interest law organizations.”
    “That’s noble and pathetic, both.”
    “And I thought a Porsche would be nice.”
    “Better,” I said. “You’d look good in a Porsche.”
    “I think so, yes. What about you, Victor? You’ve thought about this, I suppose.”
    “Some.” A radical understatement. Whole afternoons had been plundered in my fervent imaginings of great wealth acquired and spent.
    “So what would you do?”
    “The first thing I’d do,” I said, “is quit.”
    “You’d leave the firm?”
    “I’d leave the law, I’d leave the city, I’d leave my life. I’d cocoon somewhere hot and thick with coconuts and return as something else completely. I always thought I’d like to paint.”
    “I didn’t know you had any talent.”
    “I have none whatsoever,” I said cheerfully. “But isn’t that the point? If I had talent I’d be a slave to it, concerned about producing my oh so important work. Thankfully, I am completely talentless. Maybe I’d go to Long Island and wear Gap khakis and throw paint on canvas like Jackson Pollock and drink like a fish every afternoon.”
    “You don’t drink well.”
    “You’re right, and I’ve never been to Long Island, but the image is nice. And