Have Your Cake and Kill Him Too Read Online Free PDF

then looked up at the tall windows of the ballroom.
    I was too young to remember the days when bons vivants and madcap heiresses drank Prohibition liquor at glamorous Fitch parties, but I had certainly attended my share of swanky bashes in the house. My family and the Fitches went back a few generations. The spring balls were noisy and fun—fancy dress with big bands from New York and, later, with local rock groups that rattled the windows. The famous archery tournaments had been the kind of blazingly sunny summer afternoons where children played red rover on the lawn, chased everywhere by Fitch sheepdogs, while Fitch servants churned ice cream, and parents drank gallons of juleps and tried to shoot arrows at straw-stuffed targets.
    But as I reached the first plateau in the garden, I suddenly saw a huge moving van parked on the lawn by the back door. The logo of Kingsley’s auction house was printed on the side of the truck. The Philadelphia-based company specialized in estate sales.
    It was never a good sign to see an estate sale company pull into your driveway.
    Two uniformed employees struggled out of the house carrying a glass-fronted bookcase. A third Kingsley’s employee leaned against the kitchen entrance by the dog door with a cigarette.
    I stopped on the walk, struck by the end of a great family’s story. Once moneyed and influential, the Fitches had tumbled to this—the day when all their possessions went off in a truck to be sold.
    â€œNora?”
    I spun around to see Boykin Fitch standing in the brambles beyond the ornamental garden. In a pin-striped suit and a pair of thick rubber boots, he looked surprised and ludicrously handsome entangled in the weeds.
    â€œYou startled me, Boy.” I smiled. “But I think the first time I met you, it was right here in this garden.”
    He grinned as he disengaged his boot from a thorny trap and began to climb over the hedge to greet me. “Were we looking for champagne?”
    I steadied his arm as he lost his balance. “Yes! Your grand-parents chilled it in the snowbanks on New Year’s Eve and forgot where all the bottles were. We used to keep those old kerosene lamps out here for searching, remember? Are you looking for some now?”
    â€œNo.” He managed to get over the hedge, but cast a puzzled glance at the weeds around him. “I think I dropped my wallet.” He grabbed one buttock and frowned.
    â€œHave you looked in your other pockets?”
    Amiably, he followed my suggestion and began to pat his clothes. “I know I had it earlier, but I—” When one hand struck the breast pocket of his jacket, his face cleared into a smile. “Golly, will you look at that!” He produced a worn Gucci wallet from his jacket. “I had it all along!”
    Deep as a birdbath. That was Boy.
    After he put his wallet into his hip pocket, I shook his hand. “It’s nice to see you again after all these years.”
    I hadn’t bumped into him in a decade, but the years had been good to Boykin Fitch. He’d grown tall and distinguished with a patrician profile and a noble gaze prone to staring pensively into the distance. Or maybe he was just trying to remember his own phone number. For all his good looks, Boy Fitch was as endearingly dim as a Labrador retriever.
    I’d known him as a teenager, when he’d been held back for a few extra years at prep schools better known for their athletic fields than for their libraries. Family connections got Boy into the Ivy League school where it took tutors and well-paid friends six years to help him acquire his degree. After that, he’d gone to a law school nobody ever heard of, but departed without a diploma, his academic performance best forgotten.
    Lately, though, Boy had managed to find the perfect career for someone with his particular combination of good looks, good manners and lackluster intelligence.
    He found politics.
    With the help of a