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By Root 1367 0

kept insisting she use her influence to get Philip and Enid to sell him their apartments, pointing out that Philip and Schiffer would need a bigger apartment, and wouldn’t Enid want to move as well? No, Annalisa replied. The plan was that Schiffer and Enid were going to trade apartments, then Philip and Schiffer would combine the two thirteenth-floor apartments into one. Then Paul suggested they move to a bigger apartment, to something in the price range of forty million dollars. To this, she’d also objected. “It’s too much, Paul,” she said, wondering where his rabid desire for the bigger and better would end. They’d put the discussion aside when Paul briefly became obsessed with buying a plane—the new G6, which wouldn’t be delivered for two years. Paul had put down a deposit of twenty million dollars but complained bitterly about the unfairness of life, because he was number fifteen on the list and not number one. His obsessions, Annalisa noted, were getting more and more out of control, and just the other day, he’d thrown a crystal vase at Maria because she’d failed to immediately inform him of the arrival of two fish. Each fish cost over a hundred thousand dollars, and had been specially shipped from Japan. But Maria hadn’t known and had left the fish sitting in their containers for five critical hours, during which time they might have died. Maria quit, and Annalisa paid her two hundred thousand dollars—a year’s salary—not to press charges against Paul. Annalisa hired two new housekeepers instead of one, which seemed to mollify Paul, who insisted the second housekeeper be on fish duty twenty-four hours a day. This was disturbing but paled in comparison to Paul’s attitude toward Sam.

“He did it,” Paul said one evening at dinner. “That little bastard. Sam Gooch.”

“Don’t be crazy,” Annalisa said.

“I know he did it,” Paul said.

“How?”

“He gave me a look. In the elevator.”

“A thirteen-year-old boy gave you a look. And you know he did it,” Annalisa said, exasperated.

“I’m having him followed.”

Annalisa put down her fork. “Let it go,” she said firmly.

“He cost me twenty-six million dollars.”

“You ended up making a hundred million dollars that day anyway. What’s twenty-six million compared to that?”

“Twenty-six percent,” Paul replied.

Annalisa assumed Paul was exaggerating when he said he was having Sam followed, but a few nights later, as she was preparing for bed, she discovered Paul reading a detailed document that didn’t appear to be the charts and graphs he normally perused before going to sleep. “What’s that?” she demanded.

Paul looked up. “It’s the report on Sam Gooch. From the private detective.”

Annalisa snatched it out of his hands and began reading aloud. “‘The suspect was at the basketball court on Sixth Avenue…Suspect attended field trip to the Museum of Science and Technology…Suspect went into 742 Park and remained inside for three hours, at which time suspect exited, taking the Lexington Avenue subway to Fourteenth Street…’ Oh, Paul,” she said. Disgusted, she ripped the report into pieces and threw it away.

“I wish you hadn’t done that,” Paul said when she returned to bed.

“I wish you hadn’t, either,” she said, and turned off the light.

Now, every time she thought about Paul, a knot formed in her stomach. There appeared to be an inverse relationship between the amount of money he made and his mental stability. The more money he made, the more unstable he became, and with Sandy Brewer absorbed in the preparations for his trial, there was no one to keep Paul in check.

Putting aside the seating chart, Annalisa went upstairs to change. The depositions for Sandy’s upcoming trial had begun, and being among several people who had seen the cross, Annalisa and Paul were on the list. Paul had done his deposition the day before and, following the advice of his lawyer, claimed to have no recollection of seeing the cross, or of any discussions about it, or of Billy Litchfield’s potential involvement. Indeed, he claimed to have no recollection of Billy Litchfield at all, other than a belief that Billy might