“Are you saying you were blackmailing Mr. Frye and his mother before him?” Tony asked, astonished.
“Call it whatever you want. Hush money or blackmail or anything you want.”
“From what you’ve told us so far,” Tony said, “I believe the law would call it blackmail and nothing else.”
Rita Yancy smiled at him. “Do you think the word bothers me? Do you think I’m afraid of it? All quivery inside? Sonny, let me tell you, I’ve been accused of worse than that in my time. Is blackmail the word you want to use? Well, it’s all right by me. Blackmail. That’s what it is. We won’t put a prettier face on it. But of course, if you’re stupid enough to drag an old lady into court, I won’t use the same word then. I’ll just say that I did a great favor for Katherine Frye a long time ago, and that she insisted on repaying me with a monthly check. You don’t really have any proof otherwise, do you? That’s one reason I set it up on a monthly basis in the first place. I mean, blackmailers are supposed to strike and run, take it in one big bite, which is easy for the prosecutor to trace. But who’s going to believe that a blackmailer would agree to a modest monthly payment on account?”
“We don’t have any intention of bringing criminal charges against you,” Joshua assured her. “And we haven’t the slightest interest in attempting to recover the money that was paid to you. We realize that would be futile.”
“Good,” Mrs. Yancy said. “Because I’d make a bloody battle of it if you tried.”
She straightened her afghan.
I’ve got to remember this one, everything about her, Hilary thought. She’d make a great little character role in a movie some day: Grandma with spice and acid and a touch of rot.
“All we want is some information,” Joshua said. “There’s a problem with the estate, and it’s holding up the disbursement of funds. I need to get answers to some questions in order to expedite the final settlement. You say you don’t want to waste your whole day on this ‘damn silly thing.’ Well, I don’t want to waste months on the Frye estate either. My only motivation in coming here is to get the information I need to wrap up this damn silly thing of mine.”
Mrs. Yancy stared hard at him, then at Hilary and Tony. Her eyes were shrewd, appraising. Finally, she nodded with evident satisfaction, as if she had read their minds and had approved of what she’d seen in them. “I think I believe you. All right. Ask your questions.”
“Obviously,” Joshua said, “the first thing we want to know is what you had on Katherine Frye that made her and her son pay you nearly a quarter of a million dollars over the past forty years.”
“To understand about that,” Mrs. Yancy said, “you’ll need a bit of background on me. You see, when I was a young woman, at the height of the Great Depression, I looked around at all the kinds of work I could do to make ends meet, and I decided that none of them offered more than mere survival and a life of drudgery. All but one. I realized that the only profession that offered me a chance at real money was the oldest profession of them all. When I was eighteen, I became a working girl. In those days, in mixed company like this, a woman like me was referred to as a ‘lady of easy virtue.’ Today, you don’t have to tiptoe around it. You can use any damn word you want these days.” A strand of gray hair had slipped out of her bun. She pushed it away from her face, tucked it behind her ear. “When it comes to sex–the old slap-and-tickle, as it was sometimes called in my day–I’m amazed at how times have changed.”
“You mean you were a … prostitute?” Tony asked, expressing the surprise that Hilary felt.
“I was an exceptionally good-looking girl,” Mrs. Yancy said proudly. “I never worked the streets or bars or hotels or anything like that. I was on the staff of one of the finest, most elegant houses in San Francisco. We catered exclusively to the carriage trade. Only the very best sort of men. There were never fewer than ten girls and often as many as fifteen, but every one of us was striking and refined. I made good money, as I had expected I would. But by the time I was twenty-four, I realized that there was a great deal more money to be made operating my own house than there was in working in someone else’s establishment. So I found a house with a lot of charm and spent nearly all of my savings redecorating it. Then I lined up a stable of lovely and polished young ladies. For the next thirty-six years, I worked as a madam, and I ran a damned classy place. I retired fifteen years ago, when I was sixty, because I wanted to come here to Hollister where my daughter and her husband lived; I wanted to be close to my grandchildren, you know. Grandchildren make old age a lot more rewarding than I’d ever thought it would be.”