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“So it’s best that you go easy on yourself.”
March’s head snapped up, face pinched with anger.
“Go easy? What, I’m a snowflake? Feeling unsafe? Give me a break.”
He began to stand, tottered, made it to his feet and left. When he returned, he was marching stiffly. Swinging beer number two at his side. Already down by half.
Plopping down heavily, he said, “Now what?”
“If you’re okay with it,” said Milo, “we’d like to ask you a few more questions about Meagin and yourself.”
“What kind of questions?”
“Let’s start with how you met.”
March said, “Can’t see how that’s relevant but no sense prolonging this. We met by accident at the Waldorf bar. I’d finished a business meeting, wanted to go over some paperwork.”
He held up the bottle.
“I took a quiet table. Meagin was with some friends nearby. A table of women. The rest of them ignored me. She didn’t. I saw her looking at me. Looked at her and smiled. She smiled back. So I bought drinks for the table. Pretty smooth, huh? First time I’d done it. First time a woman had noticed me in a bar. Before that it was girls in college and grad school, then meeting women in the real estate world—way too much assertiveness.”
“Meagin wasn’t assertive.”
“Meagin was self-confident so she didn’t need to be assertive,” said March. “Meagin was soft-spoken and gorgeous. Why did she notice me?” He shrugged. “She said she’d always gone for older men and that hadn’t turned out so well. She thought I was younger than I actually was.” The blotches deepened. “What she told me later was, ‘I was going through a dry patch, Dougie, figured why not try the cougar thing?’ ”
His eyes hardened. “And no, it wasn’t about money. She also figured I was some kind of gofer or assistant right out of school. Actually, I was right out of school. Two years after my M.B.A.”
“But not an assistant.”
March said, “No, not that.”
He drank beer, waved a limp hand around the room. “It wasn’t this house, either, because I didn’t live here, I had a one-bedroom apartment in the Palisades. I owned the building but no great shakes. This place I bought right after we got married. Got it from the heirs of a former client. Mint condition, fully furnished, the sale benefited their asset division, for me it was the deal of the century. When Meagin saw it, she said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding,’ and laughed. She was always laughing about it. Making size-matters jokes. So it wasn’t about the money, not at all. Not one bit.”
His voice had begun to rise at the end of each sentence. Straining to convince himself.
Another bottle drained. March looked toward the exit, fidgeted, remained in place.
“So if things were so great, why did she cheat? Good question. Maybe you’lldetectthe reason.”
He placed the bottle on the floor. “The Italian, was he some kind of Mafia lowlife? Didn’t know you had them in L.A. Thought your old boss back in the fifties, what was his name…Parker. Thought Parker got rid of them and they never came back big-time.”
Milo said, “Before my time, Doug.”
“Not before mine,” said March. “I get to know every city I invest in from stem to stern. Not just the market history, the social and political history, the zeitgeist—overall atmosphere. When I came to S.C. to do the M.B.A., I thought L.A. was insane. Not a real city, more like a sprawling piece of…intentions.”
I said, “You used to invest here.”
He looked at me quizzically.
“The apartment in the Palisades.”
“Oh, that,” he said. “Nothing big, I leveraged a few apartments, made my profit, dumped them. Too much hassle, oppressive rent control. I’d actually been considering moving out of state. Then I met Meagin and she liked it here, so…why does any of this matter?”
I said, “Where was Meagin from?”
“The Midwest,” he said. “And since you’re obviously going to ask, I’m from Tuxedo Park. That’s New York.”
“The women Meagin was with the night you met her. Are they still her friends?”
