Page 73 of Nobody's Fool

Arthur pulls me aside. “I’ll wait here in case you need me.”

“I’m not going to need you.”

“I bill by the hour and Belmond is paying.”

“Then again I might.”

Arthur slaps my back. “Thatta boy.”

Lenore Spikes leads me down a corridor. “Do you know anything about Archie?”

Archie Belmond. Victoria’s father. “Not really.”

“You’re from Newark, right?”

“I was born there, yeah.”

“Archie too. Beth Israel Hospital. He grew up next town over. In Irvington. No money. His father was a house painter, his mom filed for a storefront accountant. Archie was a high school math genius. When he was seventeen he came up with an idea for a home monitoring device that allowed health care providers to track vital signs and symptoms. You know those stories about guys who start their businesses in their garage?”

I nod.

“Archie’s family didn’t have a garage. Or a car. There was a janitor who worked at the local Y. He knew about an unused room in the basement. No air-conditioning, barely any heat. That’s where Archie started what is now Belmond Industries. And when Archie hit it big, he gave that janitor ten percent of the business. You don’t know that part of the story. Archie didn’t want the credit, and the janitor didn’t want it out there. You see all this cool stuff in the library?”

I nod.

“Nothing stays more than two months at the house. That’s why you see those index cards. The Belmonds loan them to museums. They’re constantly in circulation. And the family only buys from private collections and makes sure the public now has the chance to see them—often for the first time. The Belmonds have created the largest charitable foundation in the country. You don’t hear about it because Archie doesn’t like the attention, especially for doing good. He makes the donations and insists there are no thank-yous, no banquets, no naming any buildings after him. It’s not his way.” Then: “You’re wondering why I’m telling you all this.”

I shrug.

“You think you’re about to meet spoiled rich people. You’re not. You have a picture in your mind of what they’ll be like. You’re wrong. Archie grew up with nothing. He met Talia, his wife, at Princeton. She was an American Legion scholarship kid from Columbus, Ohio. First generation to go to college. Her father worked for the postoffice. These are good people. And despite the trappings, they’ve been through a lot.”

Lenore Spikes made a left and headed down the corridor toward a room with cathedral ceilings. “Want to hear the cheesy end of my story?”

“Sure.”

“That janitor who owns ten percent of the company had a daughter. She ended up going to law school and now works as the company’s chief counsel.”

“You’re right,” I say.

“How’s that?”

“That is cheesy.”

She smiles and opens the door. I enter a conservatory with a glass cathedral ceiling and an impressive amount of foliage. The four Belmonds—Dad (Archie), Mom (Talia), Son (Thomas the Tee), Daughter (Victoria)—stand in various locations as though a director placed them before the curtain rose. Victoria is in the right-hand corner, wringing her hands. I look over at her and she offers me a tentative smile. As for the others, I know more about them than I let on to Lenore Spikes. The Pink Panthers sent me biographical sketches. Thomas, who stands with a drink in his hand, is married with two daughters, lives down the block, works for Belmond Industries in the nebulous position of marketing vice president. By all accounts, he is a decent enough fellow, what they used to call a pillar of the community, but I also know that he had rough early years, with arrests that he’d have served prison time for had he been poor, but when you’re rich it’s breezily dismissed as youthful indiscretion and you get a pass. I don’t begrudge the guy for that. I begrudge that we don’t give others that same chance.

The mother, Talia Belmond, rose from a forest-green wingback chair. She had the regal bearing, her hair completely gray and pulled back into a ponytail, highlighting her blue eyes and high cheekbones.She wore what looked like a men’s white button-down shirt (I don’t know why I say men’s—doesn’t a woman’s white button-down blouse look the same?) with the sleeves rolled up on the knotty forearms.

And finally, the first to come over and greet me, is Archie, the family patriarch. He has a roly-poly quality, a little soft in the middle with a big smile and a bald head. He sticks out a pudgy hand and shakes mine with relish. He introduces himself. His wife follows suit. When his son approaches, I keep my hand at my side.

“Sorry about the other night,” Thomas the Tee says to me.

“Yeah, that was messed up,” I say. “Do you threaten to kill anyone who wanders onto your property?”

“We are security conscious,” Thomas says. “But we would have never hurt you.”

“Your man assaulted me, so that’s a lie,” I say.

“I meant—”