Tightly the young Colombian answered, “Franklin Pierce.”
“Ha! Frankie who?”
“Pierce.” Bode’s voice dripped bitterness. “President Franklin Pierce is right. The man got it right.”
Deflated, Chub stepped back. “Jesus Willy Christ.”
“I’m outta here,” Bodean Gazzer said, and headed toward the pickup truck. Chub vented his disappointment by punching the luckless stockbroker in the nose, while Shiner concentrated his energies on the exterior of the Mustang.
To elude the process servers hired by her estranged husband, Mary Andrea Finley Krome began calling herself “Julie Channing,” a weakly veiled homage to her two all-time-favorite Broadway performers. So determined was Mary Andrea to resist divorce court that she went a step further: At a highway rest stop outside Jackson Hole, Wyoming, she cut her bounteous red hair and penciled in new full eyebrows. That same afternoon she drove into town and unsuccessfully auditioned for a ragged but rousing production of Oliver Twist.
Back in Brooklyn, the resourceful Dick Turnquist had compiled from the World Wide Web a list of theater promoters in the rural western states. He faxed to each one a recent publicity shot of Mary Andrea Finley Krome, accompanied by a brief inquiry hinting at a family emergency back East—had anyone seen her? The director in Jackson Hole was concerned enough to reply, by telephone. He said the woman in the photograph bore a keen resemblance to an actress who had, only yesterday, read for the parts of both Fagin and the Artful Dodger. And while Miss Julia Channing’s singing voice was perfectly adequate, the director said, her Cockney accent needed work. “She could’ve handled Richard the Second,” the director explained, “but what I needed was a pickpocket.”
By the time Dick Turnquist retained and dispatched a local private investigator, Mary Andrea Finley Krome was already gone from the mountain town.
What impressed Turnquist was her perseverance for the stage life. Knowing she was being pursued, Mary Andrea continued to make herself visible. And although changing one’s professional name might tax the ego, as subterfuge it was pretty feeble. Mary Andrea could have melted into any city and taken any anonymous job—waitress, receptionist, bartender—with only a negligible decline of income. Yet she chose to keep acting despite the risk of discovery and subpoena. Perhaps she was indomitably committed to her craft, but Turnquist believed there was another explanation: Mary Andrea needed the attention. She craved the limelight, no matter how remote or fleeting.
Well, Turnquist reflected, who didn’t.
She could call herself whatever she wanted—Julie Channing, Liza Bacall, it didn’t matter. The lawyer knew he would eventually catch up to the future ex—Mrs. Krome and compel her presence in the halls of justice.
He therefore was not at all distressed when The Register called to inform him that Tom Krome had died in a suspicious house fire. Having only an hour earlier chatted with his client, alive and uncharred in a Coral Gables motel, Turnquist realized the newspaper was about to make a humongous mistake. It was about to devote its entire front page to a dead man who wasn’t.
Yet the lawyer chose not to edify the young reporter on the end of the line. Turnquist was careful not to lie outright; it wasn’t required. Conveniently the young reporter failed to ask Turnquist if he’d spoken to Tom Krome that day, or if he had any reason to believe Tom Krome was not deceased.
Instead the reporter said: “How long had you known each other? What are your fondest memories? How do you think he’d like to be remembered?”
All questions that Dick Turnquist found it easy to answer. He didn’t say so, but he was grateful to The Register for saving him further aggravation in tracking Mary Andrea Finley Krome. Once she heard the news, she’d naturally assume she could stop running, Tom’s dying would get her off the hook, litigation-wise, and she’d have no reason to continue the dodge. Mary Andrea had always been less concerned with saving the marriage than with avoiding the stigma of divorce. The last true Catholic, in her estranged husband’s words.
She was also a ham. Dick Turnquist expected Mary Andrea would get the first plane for Florida, to play the irresistible role of grief-stricken widow—sitting for poignant TV interviews, attending weepy candlelight memorials, stoically announcing journalism scholarships in her martyred spouse’s name.