Chapter 12: Who Pays

I went alone.

Carlisle had wanted to come.

I had stood in his kitchen at dawn, in his borrowed sweater.

I told him that if he walked into that office, the lawyer would shut up.

"I'll wait in the car," he said.

"You'll wait at your office."

"Jess."

"I need to hear it from their mouths. Not from yours, and not from your security man's."

He studied me for a long moment, and then he nodded once.

"Call me the second you're out."

The lawyer's office was on the second floor of a narrow brick building on Broad Street, above a shop that sold antique maps.

It was a quarter past ten on Saturday morning.

The receptionist looked up when I opened the door.

Her face did something odd.

"Miss Cabell," she said. "He's with someone. But he did say, if you came by."

"He said what?"

"That you should go right in."

I went in.

The inner office had a wide desk, a view of a parking deck, and a green glass lamp.

The stooped man in the charcoal suit sat behind the desk.

He did not get up.

On the leather sofa under the window sat Marcelline Pinckney.

She held a china cup in one hand, and her cane lay beside her.

"Right on time, dear," she said. "I told him you'd come."

I shut the door behind me.

My hands were steady.

I hadn't known they would be.

"It's you," I said. "You're the Sponsor."

"I prefer the term patron."

"You paid for my brother's care."

"Every month since September."

She set the cup down.

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