Paradise Read online

  “It’s platinum,” Meredith replied on a suffocated laugh.

  “I knew it—I suppose it will never wear out, which is why whoever bought this thing two hundred years ago had it made out of that.”

  “Exactly,” Meredith answered, her shoulders shaking with laughter.

  “Honestly, Mer,” Lisa answered, laughing with her, but there were tears in her eyes. “If you didn’t feel you have to be a walking advertisement for Bancroft & Company chic, you’d still be wearing clothes from college.”

  “Only if they were very sturdy clothes.”

  Without further pretense Lisa wrapped her in a fierce hug. “He’s not half good, enough for you. No one is.”

  “He’s perfect for me,” Meredith argued, laughing and returning Lisa’s hug. “The opera benefit ball is tomorrow night. I’ll get a pair of tickets for you and Phil,” Meredith said, referring to the commercial photographer Lisa was dating. “We’re giving an engagement party afterward.”

  “Phil’s in New York,” Lisa said, “but I’ll be there. After all, if Parker’s going to be a member of our family, I have to learn to love him.” With an irrepressible grin, she added, “Even though he does foreclose on widows for grins—”

  “Lisa,” Meredith said more seriously, “Parker hates your banker jokes, and you know it. Now that we’re engaged, couldn’t you please stop bickering with him?”

  “I’ll try,” she promised. “No more bickering and no more banker jokes.”

  “And no more calling him Mr. Drysdale?”

  “I’ll stop watching Beverly Hillbillies reruns altogether,” Lisa swore.

  “Thanks,” Meredith answered, standing up. Lisa turned away abruptly and became strangely preoccupied with forcing the wrinkles out of a bolt of red felt. “Is anything wrong?”

  “Wrong?” Lisa asked, turning back, her smile overbright. “What could be wrong? My best friend has just gotten engaged to the man of her dreams. What are you going to wear tomorrow night?” she asked, hastily changing the subject.

  “I haven’t decided. I’ll stop on the second floor tomorrow and pick something smashing out. In fact, while I’m there I’ll take a look at the bridal gowns too. Parker is determined to have a big, splashy wedding with all the trimmings and formalities. He doesn’t want me to be cheated merely because he already had a big formal wedding.”

  “Does he know about—about that other thing, your other ‘wedding’?”

  “He knows,” Meredith said, her voice turning somber. “Parker was very kind and very understanding,” she began, then abruptly broke off as a series of bells began chiming insistently on the store’s loudspeaker system. Shoppers were used to hearing them and ignored them, but each division head had an assigned code, and they responded as quickly as possible. Meredith paused, listening: Two short bells, a pause, then one more. “That’s my page number,” she said with a sigh, standing up. “I have to run anyway. There’s a staff meeting in an hour, and I still have some notes to read.”

  “Give ’em hell!” Lisa said, and abruptly crawled back beneath the table, reminding Meredith of a tousled redheaded child playing in a makeshift tent she’d erected in the family dining room. Meredith went to the phone on the wall near the door and called the store operator. “This is Meredith Bancroft,” she said when the operator answered. “You just paged me.”

  “Yes, Miss Bancroft,” the operator said. “Mr. Braden in security asked if you could come to his office as soon as possible. He said to tell you it’s important.”

  14

  The security offices were on the sixth floor, behind the toy department, discreetly concealed from view by a false wall. As vice president of operations, the security division fell under Meredith’s supervision, and as she walked past an aisle where shoppers were examining elaborate electric trains and Victorian dollhouses, she wondered grimly whom security had caught stealing that required her to be there. It couldn’t be an ordinary shoplifter, because they’d handle that without her, which meant it was probably an employee. Store employees, from executives to salesclerks, were closely watched by the security division. Although shoplifters accounted for eighty percent of the number of thefts from the store, it was employee theft that did the most monetary damage. Unlike shoplifters, who could steal only what they could hide and carry, employees had dozens of opportunities and dozens of methods to steal every day. Last month the security division had caught a salesclerk who’d been issuing bogus credits to friends for false merchandise returns, and the month before a jewelry buyer had been fired for taking $10,000 worth of bribes to buy inferior merchandise from three different suppliers. Meredith always felt as if there was something extraordinarily sordid and sickening about a thief who was also an employee; it was difficult not to feel almost betrayed. Bracing herself, she stopped at a door that said MARK BRADEN, DIRECTOR OF SECURITY AND LOSS PREVENTION and went into the large waiting room that adjoined Mark’s office.

  Two shoplifters, a woman in her twenties and another in her seventies, were seated in the vinyl and aluminum chairs against the wall, under the watchful eye of a uniformed security agent. The younger woman was huddled in her chair with her arms wrapped around her stomach and traces of tears on her cheeks; she looked bedraggled, poor, and terrified. In sharp contrast, the older shoplifter was a picture of cheerful, elegant propriety—an elderly porcelain doll clad in a red and black Chanel suit, sitting erectly in her chair with her handbag propped primly on her knees. “Good morning, my dear,” she chirped in her reedy voice when she saw Meredith. “How are you today?”

  “I’m fine, Mrs. Fiorenza,” Meredith said, stifling her angry frustration as she recognized the elderly lady. Agnes Fiorenza’s husband was not only a respected pillar of the community and the father of a state senator, he was also a member of Bancroft’s board of directors, which made the entire situation touchy, which in turn was undoubtedly why Meredith had been summoned to security. “How are you?” Meredith asked before she thought better of it.

  “I’m very unhappy, Meredith. I’ve been waiting out here for a half hour, and as I explained to Mr. Braden, I really can’t linger. I have to attend a luncheon in honor of Senator Fiorenza in a half hour, and he’ll be dreadfully upset if I’m not present. After that, I’m speaking to the Junior League. Do you think you could hasten matters up a bit for me with Mr. Braden?”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Meredith said, keeping her expression noncommittal as she opened the door to Mark’s office. Mark Braden was leaning against the edge of his desk, sipping a cup of steaming coffee and talking to the security agent who’d seen the younger woman actually purloin the items she’d taken.

  An attractive, well-built man of forty-five with sandy hair and brown eyes, Braden had been a security specialist in the air force and he took his job at Bancroft’s every bit as seriously as he had taken his responsibilities to maintain national security. Meredith not only trusted and respected him, she liked him and that was evident in her wry smile as she said, “I saw Agnes Fiorenza in the waiting room. She wants me to tell you that you’re keeping her from an important luncheon.”

  Braden held up his free hand in a gesture of helpless disgust and let it fall. “My instructions are to let you deal with the old bat.”

  “What did she filch this time?”

  “A Lieber belt, a Givenchy handbag, and these.” He held out a pair of huge, gaudy blue crystal earrings from the costume jewelry section that would have looked bizarre on the diminutive elderly lady.

  “How much unused credit does she still have?” Meredith asked, referring to the account her harassed husband had set up with the store to cover his wife’s thefts in advance.

  “Four hundred dollars. It won’t cover it.”

  “I’ll talk to her, but first, could I have a cup of that coffee?” Privately, Meredith was fed up with coddling the old lady while others, like the young woman out there beside her, were prosecuted to the full extent of the law. “I’m going to have the doormen ban Mrs. Fio