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remembered darken her eyes. “That’s part of it,” she said, speaking softly. “Psychologically, my parents’ death was certainly part of it—the start of it, maybe. They drowned in a boating accident—a freak wave. That was bad enough. But, worse than that, Connie was with them. Connie was wearing a life jacket. My folks always did that, always made us wear life jackets, even though they didn’t. So when the Coast Guard arrived—” She shook her head, lowered her eyes. “Connie was the only one they found.”
    “Christ—” Bernhardt, too, shook his head. “That’s terrible. The guilt, for Connie. The loss must’ve been bad enough. But the guilt—” Eloquently, he let it go unfinished.
    “I’ve always thought—I’ve always known, really—that the accident marked Connie for life, psychologically.”
    “In what way was she marked?”
    “The usual way, for a girl. Getting involved with the wrong boys—and then the wrong men. Letting them walk all over her, victimize her so she could expiate the guilt she felt for living. Psychologically, it’s pretty open and shut, really. But that doesn’t make it easier, when it happens to someone you—” Suddenly her voice caught, choking off the rest of it.
    “And Dennis is just like the rest of them—the wrong man.”
    “Definitely, Dennis is just like the rest of them. The old-fashioned word was ‘gigolo.’”
    “‘Fortune hunter,’ too?”
    “Definitely, ‘fortune hunter.’”
    “Tell me about Dennis.”
    “The truth is,” she answered, “that Dennis is a Los Angeles type. His father was a supporting actor in Hollywood—not much more than a bit player, really. He’s one of those men who was born with a handsome face but not much else. And Dennis is just like him, really. Except that Dennis has pretensions. And ambitions, too. Dennis is greedy.”
    “What’re his ambitions?”
    “He wants to be one of the beautiful people,” she answered promptly. “Which is exactly the life he’s living, at least superficially. He’s a gentleman vintner, which is currently the with-it thing to be doing, as you know. And, of course, there’s the townhouse in Pacific Heights. And, yes, he has an airplane, too.”
    “Did Connie go along with all that?”
    “Connie fitted in. She had the looks, and the money. For the kind of life Dennis wants, that’s all you need—as long as your forehand is acceptable.”
    “Does Dennis inherit everything?”
    “He inherits a third of her estate. I get a third. And John gets a third, when he’s twenty-one.”
    “Who administers John’s third?”
    “Dennis does. And there’s a provision that John gets an allowance until he’s twenty-one, administered by Dennis.”
    “What’s the total value of the estate?”
    “We won’t know exactly until the will’s actually probated.”
    “What d’you estimate?”
    “I’d estimate at least twenty-five million dollars.” She spoke calmly, without visible emotion. The message: for Janice Hale, wealth was synonymous with ordinary, day-to-day life. The moral: the rich were different.
    Twenty-five million divided by three. More than fifteen million for Dennis Price—plus access to his son’s allowance, plus an administrator’s fee for the son’s share of the estate.
    “How soon will the will be probated, do you know?”
    “The time for probate is six months, if there aren’t any complications. That’d be four months from now.”
    “Do you have the name of Connie’s lawyer?”
    “Yes. It’s Albert Fink. He’s in San Francisco. I haven’t found him very helpful, though.”
    “Is it all right if I talk to him?”
    “Yes. And when you do, tell me what he says.” As she said it, Bernhardt heard the hard edge of resolution in her voice, saw the muted flash of determination in her clear blue eyes. Janice Hale spoke softly, but she knew what she wanted—and knew how to get it. She was a slim woman, economically proportioned. Beneath a casually worn cotton