Free McNally's Dilemma by Lawrence Sanders, Vincent Lardo

halfpast noon.”
    “Sneak in two aspirin on my saucer and earn my undying gratitude,” I pleaded.
    “I don’t want your undying gratitude. I want your honest expense account.”
    Offer the improbable and they demand the impossible. I squared my shoulders and marched into the lion’s den.
    John Fairhurst III was a handsome man—noticeably tall even seated—slim, with a full head of white hair and blue eyes that looked guardedly at everything that came into their view, including Archy McNally. His handshake was firm and his smile more inviting than his stare.
    “Sorry I’m late, but my morning appointment ran over and the traffic on Worth Avenue is a harbinger of the approaching season.”
    Father raised one eyebrow at my opening salvo, but noticing the slight widening of his lips beneath his mustache, I knew I had passed muster.
    “No problem,” Mr. Fairhurst assured me. “I was enjoying your father’s company. He was up at Yale, too. After my time, to be sure,” he added with a sigh of resignation.
    “I was right behind you, John,” Father gallantly replied.
    John! Well, already on a first-name basis. How cozy. But then, Prescott McNally was a fakir par excellence who knew how to charm cobras, especially rich and famous ones.
    As Yale was not a subject I wished to dwell upon, I scrutinized John Fairhurst III while he and Pater replayed a Yale/Harvard football game whose participants were now either great-grandfathers or dead. Dressed in gray flannels, a double-breasted blazer, and school tie, all Fairhurst needed was a patch over one of those blue eyes to be mistaken for a Hathaway model awaiting his cue. But don’t let that mislead you. Fairhurst’s white shirt was more Turnbull & Asser than Macy’s mezzanine. His even tan and flowing white mane cried out for a glass of tonic water in one hand as the other rested gently on the steering wheel of a cabin cruiser, and—presto!—we had the man from Schweppes. The guy was a living manufacturer’s logo.
    When my grandfather Frederick McNally was a mere boy practicing pratfalls for his future career as Freddy McNally—a bulbous-nosed burlesque comic on the old Minsky circuit—Fairhurst’s grandfather was helping women and children into lifeboats before taking his place beside men of good breeding and little sense, all hell-bent on going down with the ship, thereby ensuring Hollywood an endless supply of oceanic disaster films.
    “And now,” Fairhurst was saying, “the reason for my visit.” He removed an envelope from the inside breast pocket of his blazer, handling it as if it were either scalding hot or contaminated. He passed it on to father, who read it with his glasses perched on the tip of his nose while a look of unbridled horror crossed his face.
    “Well,” Prescott McNally exclaimed to the piece of paper in his hand, “what a vile piece of hogwash.”
    I was bursting with curiosity, but Father, making the most of the moment, read the vile piece of hogwash a second time before letting out yet another, “Well!”
    “May I?” I leaned forward in my chair and reached across Father’s desk, my interest piqued beyond endurance. He was about to pass it over when there was a quiet knock on the door followed by the entrance of Mrs. Trelawney behind a tea trolley. We all smiled sheepishly, and Father, dropping the letter like a hot potato, said, “How nice, Mrs. Trelawney. Just what we needed, yes, John?”
    Fairhurst readily agreed as Mrs. Trelawney played mother. We could have been in the middle of a garden club confab, delighting one another with tales of rose blight and the pros and cons of forcing late bloomers to strut their stuff before their time. Palm Beach society could make the British stiff-upper-lippers look like wimps, and the head of McNally & Son reveled in this charade like a ham playing to the balcony. And, alas, so did I—proving once again that bird dip does not fall far from the carrier pigeon.
    Two white dots decorated the