Deadly Beloved by Jane Haddam Read Free Book Online

dangerous to carry cash like that in the city in any kind of package.”
    “I understand that.”
    “Do you mind if I ask what it is you want so much money for?”
    “Yes,” Patsy said. “As a matter of fact, I do mind.”
    Mrs. Havoric looked nonplussed. “Miss MacLaren. You must realize—”
    “Ms.,” Patsy said.
    “Excuse me?” Mrs. Havoric said.
    “Ms.,” Patsy repeated. “I’m married now. To a man named Stephen Willis. So I’m not Miss MacLaren. I’m Ms.”
    “Oh,” Mrs. Havoric said.
    “I suppose I could get my attorneys to force you to give me my money,” Patsy said, “but I don’t really see why I should have to do that, since legally you’re required to give it to me whenever I want it. This is a demand account.”
    “I know this is a demand account,” Mrs. Havoric said sharply. “I just want to make sure you’re not taking this money out to buy an oil well, and then next week you come back here and try to sue us for not trying to stop you.”
    “I won’t come back here next week and try to sue you. Word of honor. There is no oil well.”
    “What if you walk out the door and get mugged?”
    “I don’t think I’d have to worry about that if this was done discreetly,” Patsy said, “which, quite frankly, up to now it hasn’t been. Could I have my money in hundred-dollar bills?”
    Mrs. Havoric tapped the top of her desk. She looked more than put out now. She looked angry. She was studying Patsy’s face with such concentration, Patsy thought she was trying to memorize it.
    “All right,” she said finally. “Just a minute please. I’ll take care of it myself.”
    Patsy pushed the Coach bag across the desk. “Put it in here,” she said. “That way, nobody has to see me with it.”
    “Don’t you want to count it?”
    “I’ll count it in a stall in the ladies’ room. If you have a ladies’ room.”
    Mrs. Havoric squared her shoulders. “I can make a ladies’ room available to you,” she said. Then she walked away, strutting a little, like the high school English teacher nobody wanted to have for study hall monitor. Patsy watched her pull the teller away from her window and hold up a whole line of people waiting to do simple transactions.
    This, Patsy thought, was what women’s lib had gotten them all. These days, the Mrs. Havorics of the world were bank managers instead of high school English teachers and it didn’t matter anyway. They still weren’t making much money and they still weren’t happy. That was what marriage did to you, no matter what anybody said about it. It split you and gutted you and stuffed you full of lemongrass. It made you all bitter.
    Mrs. Havoric was coming back across the bank with Patsy’s Coach bag in her hands, and Patsy suddenly remembered.
    She wasn’t married anymore.
    She wasn’t married anymore.
    She had given herself a summary divorce this morning, and now she was free.

6.
    K ARLA PARRISH ALMOST NEVER thought of herself as a successful woman. “Success,” in her mind, meant having a big apartment on a high floor in New York City or a BMW and a Porsche in the driveway of a house in Syosset or a lot of jewelry to wear to parties that had to be locked up in a safe afterward, for insurance reasons. Success, in other words, meant having a lot of things, and Karla had never had much in the way of things. Enough underwear to get through two weeks straight without doing laundry, as much in the way of other clothes as could be stuffed into a double strap pack without making her feel like she was lifting stones when she picked it up—Karla never seemed to need that much from day to day, and she honestly couldn’t think of what else she would buy for herself if she got the chance. She wore her long straight hair pulled back these days, instead of falling free to her shoulders, because she thought she had to make some concession to being forty-eight. She didn’t want to spend the time or the money to get it fixed up in beauty parlors.