“Very well,” he said. He pushed his chair back, got up, and told Jarrell, “You will excuse me. Mr. Goodwin will know what information he needs.” He circled around the red leather chair and marched out.
I sat at my desk, got notebook and pen, and swiveled to the client. “First,” I said, “all the names, please.”
Chapter 2
I CAN’T UNDERTAKE TO make you feel at home in that Fifth Avenue duplex penthouse because I never completely got the hang of it myself. By the third day I decided that two different architects had worked on it simultaneously and hadn’t been on speaking terms. Jarrell had said it had twenty rooms, but I think it had seventeen or nineteen or twenty-one or twenty-three. I never made it twenty. And it wasn’t duplex, it was triplex. The butler, Steck, the housekeeper, Mrs. Latham, and the two maids, Rose and Freda, slept on the floor below, which didn’t count. The cook and the chauffeur slept out.
Having got it in my notebook, along with ten pages of other items, that Wyman, the son, and Lois, the daughter, were Jarrell’s children by his first wife, who had died long ago, I had supposed that there were so many variations in taste among the rooms because Jarrell and the first wife and the current marital affliction, Trella, had all had a hand at it, but was set right on that the second day by Roger Foote, Trella’s brother. It was decorators. At least eight decorators had been involved.