Send the Ugly One, He’ll Reject Her! They Laughed — But the Mafia Boss Was Speechless!

Chapter Fifteen — The Man in Naples, Florida

The retired partner’s name was Hollis Prine, and he was eighty-three, and he lived in a house with a flat roof and a lanai in Naples, Florida, and he had not voted his shares of Ashcroft Whitfield since 1994.

Maren knew three things about him before she flew south: that he had been Gordon’s mentor in the eighties and had been quietly, personally humiliated when Gordon had bought him out of the partnership’s voting arrangement without asking him; that he had a wife in a memory-care facility twenty minutes from his house and visited her twice a day, every day, without fail, for six years; and that he had a dog named Beau who was, per Halloran’s hairdresser’s cousin, and via a chain of informants Sal Ferro had assembled over five days, the entire reason Hollis Prine still got out of bed.

“He’ll never sell,” Sal said. “He’s old money. Old money doesn’t sell to strangers.”

“He won’t sell to strangers,” Maren agreed. “So I’m not going to be a stranger.”

She flew down two weeks before the filing, alone, on a commercial flight, in a plain gray dress she had chosen herself, with her hair back and her face bare and no one from the compound anywhere near her. She had argued about that too — Lucian had wanted to send Rocco, and Maren had refused on the grounds that a man who looks like a doorframe walking into a lanai in Naples is a message, and the message she needed to send to Hollis Prine was not the mafia is here but your protégé’s daughter is here.

Rocco had driven her to the airport and had stared out the windshield for a long time and then said, gruffly, “If anything goes wrong, call.”

“I will.”

“Anything.”

“I know, Rocco.”

“You don’t know. He doesn’t send people alone. In five years I’ve never once seen him send anybody alone.” A pause. “That’s not a complaint. That’s me telling you that you’re the first.”

Maren had looked at him for a while after that, from the back seat, and then said, “I know.”

Hollis Prine opened his own front door.

He was thin and very upright, with the shoulders of a man who had once been strong and the hands of a man who had once worked with them, and he looked at her through the screen with an expression of mild, courteous suspicion. Behind him, a small wiry dog barked twice and then, deciding she was not a threat, walked away.

“Mr. Prine,” Maren said. “My name is Maren Ashcroft. I’d like twenty minutes.”

Hollis Prine’s face did something complicated.

“Ashcroft,” he said slowly. “Which one.”

“Estelle’s,” Maren said.

The old man looked at her for a long moment. Then he looked, deliberately, at the left side of her face. And then — and this was the moment Maren had come seven hundred miles to find — he did not look away.

“Come in,” he said.

He made her a cup of tea in a kitchen with a lot of magnets on the refrigerator, and he sat her on the lanai facing a canal where a heron stood in the shallows for an hour at a time, and he listened while she told him why she had come. She told him the whole thing, straight, in order, without ornament: the fake loss, the Cayman account, the household siphons, the three plane tickets, the staff of thirty in a house on Commonwealth Avenue, and the codicil with the impossible date on it.

When she was finished, Hollis Prine sat back in his plastic lanai chair and looked out at the water for a while.

“Gordon,” he said at last, “was the brightest young man I ever hired. Do you know what I paid him in 1989? Fifty-two thousand dollars a year, and he thanked me for it, and I thought he meant it.” He shook his head slowly. “He took my voting block away in 1994 by reclassifying a share class in a document I signed without reading, because he told me it was about insurance. I read it four months later. I wrote him a letter about it. I don’t know whether he got it.” He looked at her. “Your mother was the one I liked, though.”

Maren’s throat tightened. “You knew her.”

“Everybody liked Estelle. She was the only person in that firm who could tell Gordon no and have him take it.” He tapped the arm of the chair with two fingers. “You know what she told me once? This was at a Christmas party, 1992. She said to me — she was holding you, you were about a year old — she said, Hollis, that man has a hole in him where the wanting is, and one day it’s going to swallow something he actually loves, and it won’t even be his fault.” He looked at Maren. “I have thought about that sentence at least once a month for thirty-three years.”

Maren sat on the lanai with the heron in the canal and her tea going cold and did not say anything, because there was nothing to say.

“So,” Hollis Prine said. “What do you want from me.”

“Your ten percent,” Maren said. “Your vote, on a special meeting, on a date I’ll tell you. I’m not asking you for your shares, and I’m not asking you to give me anything. I’m asking you to vote your ten percent the way you would have voted it in 1994 if you had read the document.” She set her cup down. “And I’ll tell you the price, because I’m not going to pretend there isn’t one. My father will know you voted against him. He will know it was me who came. And he will spend the rest of his life telling anyone who will listen that you betrayed him at eighty-three for a stranger in a gray dress.”

Hollis Prine looked at her.

And then he laughed — a dry, delighted, rasping laugh, the laugh of a man who had been bored for eleven years.

“That’s the price?” he said. “Miss Ashcroft, I have been waiting to go against that little pickpocket since the first Bush administration.” He picked up his tea and drank it. “What’s the date?”

He walked her to the door. On the step, holding the screen, he said: “Your mother’s trust. That twelve percent. You’re the sole member of the class?”

“Yes.”

“Then you’re not asking for my vote at all,” Hollis Prine said. “You’re asking me to be a witness. Because in a year or five years, when all of this is a thing that happened to a family in a city I don’t live in, I’m going to be the only person alive who can say what was true.” He looked at her steadily. “I knew your mother. I liked her. And I want you to know that if Gordon comes to this house in six months and knocks on this door and asks me to say I was confused, I am going to laugh in his face and close it.” He stepped back. “Now get off my steps before my dog decides he loves you and I have to keep you.”

Maren walked down the driveway in the Florida heat with her heart going hard and light in her chest, and got in the taxi, and sat in the back with her hands in her lap, and realized she was smiling.

She had never once, in fifteen years, been looked at by a stranger the way Hollis Prine had looked at her: as a person with a name.

She took out her phone. She typed one line to Lucian. Ten percent is in. He knew my mother.

The reply came in under a minute: Of course he did.