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for anybody. He had chosen “Kelly” because, in spite of the fact that he was working his way to business school and a sensible career in accounting, he had secret fantasies of becoming an actor. There was an actor everybody said he looked like, named John Forsyth, who had a television program in afternoon reruns that year called Bachelor Father. The father in question on that program had a niece who lived with him named Kelly. That was where Kelly got his name. It would have bothered him endlessly if anybody had realized that he had taken his name from a girl, but nobody did, so that worked out all right.
    Now, thirty years later, Kelly Pratt looked even more like John Forsyth than he had then, and John Forsyth had been in a new television program, and Kelly liked to imagine himself as Blake Carrington. That was the good thing about this trip to Maine. Spending the weekend with a couple of old movie stars was exactly the kind of thing Blake Carrington would do, although he probably wouldn’t bring their accounting work along to go over the figures. Normally, Kelly would never have gone on an errand like this himself. The tiny accounting company he had started with his best friend from college, Abraham Kahn, had grown. It wasn’t the size of the giants like Arthur Andersen or Deloitte, but it took up three floors of a good building in midtown Manhattan and kept a hundred and fifty people on payroll. When they started out, Kelly had wanted to do as much corporate work as they could get, but Bram had been adamant. “Do personals,” he’d said, “big accounts, but personals.” And Bram had been right. Kahn and Pratt handled the business affairs of three stars of the Metropolitan Opera, two internationally famous symphony conductors, all six of the principal characters on the most important soap opera still shot in New York, and the entire roster of the most successful team in the history of the National Football League. Kahn and Pratt even appeared on and off in Liz Smith’s column. It had become a status symbol of a sort for Kahn and Pratt to agree to handle you. Lately, there had even been a trickle of rock-and-roll stars through the door, including a woman who spent more of her time on stage half-naked than reasonably clothed. Kelly had been all excited about it, but Bram had refused to let him take her on. Rock stars made Bram very, very nervous.
    Now Bram was sitting in the visitor’s chair in Kelly Pratt’s office, smoking a pipe, his long legs stretched out across the carpet. Kelly sometimes thought it was Bram who should have changed his name. Tall and lean, with the chiseled features of a Yankee aristocrat, Abraham Kahn could have passed himself off as a John Endicott or a Martin Cadwalader any time he wanted to. Instead, he belonged to the Harmonie Club and a Conservative synagogue and kept an Israeli flag hanging on a pole next to an American one in a corner of his office.
    Bram had his legs crossed with one ankle on the other knee. His pipe was sending smoke signals up to the ceiling. Every time he looked at the paper Kelly had given him, he sighed heavily.
    “It doesn’t make any sense,” Bram said finally.
    Kelly exploded. “I know it doesn’t make any sense, Bram. I know that. I was hoping for something a little more constructive.”
    “How much more constructive could I be? Just look at this sheet, Kelly. Whole chunks of money just seem to go missing. Except for the daughter’s trust, of course. That’s intact.”
    “That would have to be intact,” Kelly said. “It was administered by the Chase Manhattan Bank. They’re too damn high-profile a company to pull any crap.”
    “Yes, well, the problem is, you couldn’t really say that anybody pulled any crap in this case. You couldn’t say much of anything. It never occurred to me before, but living without computers must have been heaven for con men and cheats.”
    “Most people would say that living with computers has been heaven for con