You’re Lonely When You’re Dead

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On a nice sunny morning in mid-March, around eleven o’clock, I drove over to the Santa Rosa Estate where the owner, Jay Franklin Cerf, was expecting me.

I had been out when he had called the office, but Paula Bensinger, who runs the business and me too if I don’t watch out, had told him I would be over within the hour. He hadn’t volunteered any information except the matter was urgent and confidential, but the fact that he owned the Santa Rosa Estate was enough for her. You had to have money to run a place that size and money always got Paula steamed up.

By the time I arrived at the office she had dug up some dope about Cerf, and while I made myself presentable she rattled off the facts from news clippings we keep on all the big-shots in Orchid City. Cerf was the President of the Red Star Navigation Company, a gigantic wholesale lumber and shipping business operating along the Pacific Coast. He had been a widower for the past two years — his wife had been killed in a car accident — and up to now, his private life had been a lot less exciting than the mummy-room of the Park-Lifingstone Museum. Recently he had married a mannequin, and that, Paula thought, was probably why he wanted to see me. When a man of his age and wealth falls for a mannequin, she went on cynically, and is sucker enough to marry her, the writing goes up on the wall.

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