Social Crimes

by Jane Stanton Hitchcock

  “I don’t want to be thought of as a terrible person,” she said.

  “I can’t help what people think of you, Monique.”

  We both knew this was not strictly true. I knew my opinion still counted for something in New York. Suddenly, her expression changed. A moment before she had been meek and imploring. Now a look of icy determination hardened her face. I’d never seen anything quite like it.

  “So you refuse to help me?” she said in a low, almost threatening tone.

  “I refuse to know you.”

  “And you will block me from getting on the board of the Municipal Museum?”

  At last, the real agenda.

  “What’s the French equivalent for ‘over my dead body’?” I inquired.

  She looked me up and down, then raised her right fist to her face and tipped it toward me as if it were a fencing épée.

  “En garde, mon amie,” she said, and walked out of the room.

  After she left, I sat in the bedroom for a long, long time, thinking about the tale Monique had told me and about my late husband. I felt rather like one of those women I sometimes watched with grim fascination on TV—the hapless wives of bigamists, perverts, and serial killers who tearfully confess how utterly astonished they’d been to learn of their husbands’ secret lives and depravity. Her tale of woe was a bit too operatic for my taste. I kept wishing I’d asked her more questions. There were too many gaps in the story. But I’d been so flummoxed by the initial revelation I wasn’t thinking straight.

  What makes this woman tick? I wondered. There was definitely something weird about her. What was this need to remain close to me after all that had happened? She’d won. She could go and make a hundred new lives with two hundred million dollars.

  She had my houses. She had my money. Now she wanted my life. And the first rung was getting on the board of the Muni. In New York, money is worthless to the social climber who fails to make the right connections. I’d taught her that myself. The city was full of rich aspirants craving invitations from the so-called A-list. If I froze Monique out, she’d be just another woman in a couture suit looking for a lunch date, denied access to the true precincts of social power.

  I was so lost in thought I didn’t even realize that night had fallen and I was sitting in the dark. I switched on a light and got ready for bed. It took me a while to fall asleep. My mind was still racing.

  Monique was a strange bird, I thought as I closed my eyes. I didn’t relish having her for an enemy, but it struck me as marginally less dangerous than having her for a friend.

  Chapter 11

  I figured the one person who might be able to shed some light on Monique’s behavior was Nate Nathaniel. I was none too fond of Nate, but there’s something about having known a person for years—adversary or not—that bonds you to them when an interloper enters the picture. We had been comrades-at-arms as far as the will was concerned. Nate had bent over backward to be kind to me since Lucius died for the simple reason, I believe, that he loathed seeing half of Lucius’s estate go to a complete stranger almost as much as I did.

  I asked Nate to have lunch with me. We met at the Oyster Bar in the Plaza Hotel because it was near his midtown offices. Nate was sitting at the table when I arrived. He stood up as I neared, all polish and politesse, immaculately dressed in a three-piece pinstripe suit, his thick sandy hair neatly parted on the side, wearing his supernaturally youthful looks like a badge of honor.

  We ordered lunch and chitchatted about nothing in particular until it arrived. I had a glass of white wine to loosen me up.

  “Nate, you knew Lucius better than anyone. I have to ask you something: Did you know he wanted to marry Monique?”

  The circumspect lawyer jabbed absently at the shaved ice of the oyster platter with his fork. It was clear he did know. I clenched my teeth.

  “How long have you known?” I asked him. He was silent. “Look, I understand you’re not supposed to violate attorney-client privilege, or whatever they call it. But under the circumstances . . . ? Come on, Nate, I need to know.”

  “How did you find out?”

  “The prospective bride informed me herself.”

  Nate’s head bobbed up and down. “I figured she might. She’s very upset.”

  “She’s upset?”

  “Come on, Jo. She’s been through hell.” He narrowed his eyes. “Did she tell you everything?”

  “You mean about the baby? Yes. She told me. I don’t believe her for a minute.”

  “Oh, I think it’s true.”

  “Why? She could have made the whole thing up. Who would know?”

  “Without going into details, I have reason to believe it is, that’s all.”

  I eyed him suspiciously. “How do you know so much about it?”

  “I just do.”

  “Well, obviously, she must have given you the same sob story she gave me. But you believe her.”

  “I think I do, yes.”

  “Did you know that she’s been here for nearly a year? And that Lucius put her up in the same apartment building where he put me up years ago?”

  “I had no idea about all that until I came out for the weekend.”

  “He told you then?”

  “Yes.”

  I felt my heart beat faster with anxiety. “What exactly did he say?”

  “Jo, what’s the point of all this?”

  “The point is I want to know.”

  “What good will it do? It’ll only hurt you.”

  “I want to know, Nate. Now what exactly did he say?”

  Nate heaved a sigh. “He told me he was in love with her and that he was going to ask you for a divorce.”

  “And what did you say?”

  “I told him he was nuts.”

  “Thank you, Nate,” I said in no more than a whisper. I was on the verge of tears. It was all I could do to keep my composure. “Did you know he was planning to change his will?”

  Nate dropped his fork and raised his hand like a traffic policeman. “Absolutely not,” he said. “There was never a discussion of the will. I swear to you. He went to Sullivan on his own. I wasn’t even there. You know that.”

  I let go an inadvertent sigh. “Did you know she was pregnant?”

  “He told me that she suspected she was.”

  “You were so friendly with her that weekend. Why?”

  “Well, I didn’t know anything until the last day I was there. I thought you’d invited me out to meet her. I had no idea anything was going on between them.”

  “Weren’t you shocked when he told you?”

  “To be honest . . . How shall I put this? Yes and no.”

  “Well, there’s a lawyerly answer. What do you mean?”

  Nate leveled me with a deep gaze. “He’d done it before, Jo.”

  I swallowed hard. I got his drift. “Have you been waiting twenty years to say that to me, Nate?”

  He shook his head. “No, Jo . . . I just knew he was capable of it, that’s all.”

  “So you weren’t shocked?”

  “Come on, Jo, of course I was. I’m saying his behavior didn’t come out of the blue, that’s all.”

  “There was a precedent: me.”

  “If you like.”

  “Well, maybe it’ll shock you to hear this. I believe that Monique may have had a hand in Lucius’s death.”

  Nate cocked his head to one side. “What do you mean?”

  I leaned in toward him across the table and spoke softly.

  “The doctors absolutely forbade Lucius to have sex. You knew it. I knew it. She knew it. In light of this will, it would make sense that she would seduce him, knowing what might happen, don’t you agree?”

  Nate leaned back and shook his head in mild amusement. “Sex as a deadly weapon? Difficult to prove. You didn’t actually see them going at it, did you?”

  “No . . . But they obviously were. They were having an affair.”

  “Yes, but that day? That minute?”

&nbs
p; “Look, Nate, when I walked in on them in the pool house, something was definitely going on.”

  “But you say he was alive when you walked in?”

  “Yes, so what? The minute I opened the door he started gasping.”

  “Perhaps because you caught him.”

  “She put him in danger.”

  “If you thought that, why did you leave her alone with him?”

  “He was having a heart attack, for God’s sake! I had to call the ambulance, didn’t I? She wouldn’t do it.”

  “What can I say, Jo? It’s unlikely she used sex to kill him.”

  “No? With a two-hundred-million-dollar motive? Why not?” I drained my glass of white wine.

  “Jo, I hate to be crude, but it seems to me that the only smoking gun here, possibly, was Lucius’s.”

  “Well, I think she did it. I think she seduced him, told him she was in love with him, made him believe she was pregnant, got him to change his will, and then killed him. Maybe not literally. But she knew damn well he could have another heart attack.”

  “Sounds pretty diabolical,” Nate said.

  “Exactly.” I stared at him unblinking until he looked away.

  “Jo, you’re understandably upset. But I think you’re complicating things.”

  “What’s complicated? It’s very simple: She murdered him for the money. Second oldest motive in the world.”

  “What’s the first?” he inquired, slipping the last oyster into his mouth.

  “Murdering for love.”

  “Interesting choice of words.”

  The waiter asked me if I was finished eating. I’d barely touched my shrimp salad. I nodded for him to take it away. He cleared our places. We ordered coffee but no dessert.

  “Jo,” Nate said, after a time. “You’ve made some very serious accusations here today. I hope you’re not intending to share these thoughts with anyone but me.”

  “Believe me, I’d like to tell the whole world.”

  “Well, don’t. Or you could find yourself in a big, fat, juicy lawsuit for slander.”

  “She wants to go on the board of the Muni, Nate. And she wants me to help her. Imagine? She thinks she can just take over my existence. Well, she’s got another thing coming.”

  “You don’t have to have anything to do with her. Just be careful what you say. I don’t want to see you have any more problems.”

  “You know what she said to me when I saw her? ‘En garde.’ Like we’re now in a duel. You should have seen her face. It was scary.”

  “Don’t obsess, Jo. She’s not worth it.”

  “She won’t succeed here, Nate. Not if I have anything to do with it. I happen to believe that in spite of everything my opinion still counts for a lot. Don’t you think?”

  I was trying to bolster myself up. But the truth was, I felt insecure. Nate must have sensed this because he reached across the table and patted my hand reassuringly.

  “Your opinion means everything in this town. You’re still Jo Slater.”

  I felt curiously relieved when he said this. It was the first time I had ever really liked Nate. His kindness touched me deeply. I thought I’d probably been mistaken about him all these years. It was Lucius I should have been wary of, not Nate.

  I knew that after I honored my pledge to the Municipal Museum, I would be effectively broke. I had a few drawings and some jewelry I could sell to tide me over for a time, but these things were hardly enough to sustain me. I had to find a job. Starting all over again at my age was terrifying. Still, other women had done it. Besides, I had no choice.

  I accepted June Kahn’s kind offer to move in with her temporarily until I could find a decent place to rent. New York was insanely expensive. A rental the size of the powder room in my old apartment was offered to me for three thousand dollars a month.

  June and Charlie Kahn lived in a sprawling duplex in the second most fashionable building on Fifth Avenue. The apartment, whose grand, boxy entertaining rooms overlooked Central Park, was fussily decorated with gaudy French furniture and nineteenth-century oil paintings of Paris street scenes where well-dressed ladies carrying parasols coped with small dogs. The orange moiré silk living room was, to my mind, a subdefinition of hell.

  “Here we are, sweetie, all nice and tucked away from the rest of the house,” June said, showing me into a spacious guest room at the end of a long corridor in the back of the apartment—a room so relentlessly white and lacy it looked like a giant doily.

  “I’m sorry there’s so much luggage,” I said as I helped a beleaguered-looking young Irishwoman carry my suitcases. “I feel like one of the Joads.” June looked at me blankly. “The Grapes of Wrath?” I reminded her. “The group read it year before last.”

  “Oh yes, that book, Lord . . . Sweetie, you’re welcome to stay as long as you like. You know, until you find someplace else.”

  I caught June rolling her eyes at the maid who placed the last of the suitcases on a luggage rack at the end of the bed. No matter how close friends are, moving in on them is always an imposition.

  When June left, I lay down on the canopied queen-size bed and stared up at the ceiling, where a group of frisky cherubs painted in the circle of the canopy’s crown stared down at me with oversized eyes and angelic smiles. June and her cherubs. Still, she was a good soul to put me up and I was grateful.

  Chapter 12

  Not long after I’d settled in with June, Roger Lowry, the president of the Municipal Museum, called me up and asked me to join him for lunch. I saw this as a fortuitous coincidence because I’d been thinking of sounding Roger out about a job. I was toying with several ideas, one of which was starting a consulting business that would basically advise people how to form a museum-quality collection.

  Lowry, a tall, silver-haired man with a crinkly face and an affable manner, was an old friend, much indebted to me professionally. It was I who had plucked him out of an obscure foundation and recommended him for his current plum position. My faith in Roger had been amply justified. He’d been a great success, raising vast amounts of money, persuading important collectors to bequeath their paintings to the museum, initiating exchange programs with other top museums around the world, beefing up conservation efforts, expanding the gift shop. He and his vivacious, determined wife, Lil, were much-sought-after fixtures on the New York social scene.

  We ate in the Municipal’s private dining room, where white-jacketed waiters hovered watchfully and the tinkling of silver on china broke the general hush. Being somewhat of a social cryptographer, as it were, I didn’t take long to decipher the decorous conversation we were having over green salads and grilled fish.

  Lowry thanked me profusely for my million-dollar pledge, five hundred thousand dollars of which I had already given. He had the good grace not to mention the other five that was still owing, though we both knew one of the purposes of the lunch was to find out exactly when or indeed if those monies would be paid. I was well aware that Lowry, along with practically everyone else in New York—and the whole Northern Hemisphere, it seemed—knew the details of my current situation.

  Under the guise of reassuring me that my position at the Muni was “absolutely golden,” as he put it, Lowry, using nothing but praise and flattery, adroitly watered the seeds of doubt already flowering in my own mind about my ability to serve the institution I loved. I could hear the rumblings. I imagined there were those who felt my coveted seat on the board should eventually be given to someone more equipped to handle the financial obligations required of such an honor. By never saying anything explicit and, indeed, by reinforcing the museum’s as well as his own great debt to me—“The Slater Gallery is incomparable, Jo”—Lowry, without meaning to, I’m sure, confirmed to me that my resignation had undoubtedly been discussed at length. I was prepared, of course. I’d been around long enough to know this was an unfortunate inevitability. The point was if I could weather the storm, that’s all.

  As Lowry’s slick patter segued into the fresh fruit cup
dessert, talking about the “new money” out there and how exciting it was to see “these young rich kids” taking an interest in art, I thought of all the CEO’s who’d give their golden parachutes to take my place on the board of that prestigious institution. There was no limit to the number of social climbers desperate to see their names chiseled onto commemorative marble plaques or carved into the mahogany lintels of new galleries. The Muni was a grand old New York institution, and people were willing to pay mightily to be associated with it.

  As he escorted me out of the dining room, I said, “Look, Roger, I don’t feel it’s necessary, at least not at this time, for me to resign from the board—”

  He blanched at the suggestion. “My God, Jo, I never meant to imply—”

  I cut him off with a gentle pat on his arm and a wan smile. “Roger, dear, we’ve known each other too long. You have to think about the museum, I know that. Just because I’ve been reelected for the past fifteen years doesn’t mean, well, that I’ll automatically be reelected again. I think that’s what you’re really telling me, isn’t it?”

  He looked at me squarely. “Jo, you know you’ll always have my full support. I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for you. I never meant to imply anything.”

  “I have a good eye, Roger . . . And a good ear.”

  On my way out, I spotted Ethan Monk walking pensively in long strides, head down, as was his wont.

  “Ethan!” My voice echoed through the marble corridor.

  The Monk stopped abruptly and looked around. “Jo?” he said tentatively, focusing his myopic gaze.

  “I just had lunch with Roger,” I said, approaching him. “Ethan, tell me honestly: Do you think I should resign from the board?”

  Ethan looked at me quizzically. “Roger didn’t suggest that, did he?”

  “He didn’t have to. I get the drift . . . I probably should resign. It’s not as if I can put my money where my taste is anymore.”

  “Come with me,” Ethan said sternly.

  Ethan grabbed my hand and led me through the Roman antiquities rooms to the Armor Hall and down a flight of stairs to the Slater Gallery, where one of the finest collections of eighteenth-century French furniture in the world was on display. He stopped in front of the first room, Le Petit Salon, a reconstruction of one of Marie Antoinette’s private apartments in Versailles. There, the lovely writing desk made for the Queen by Jacob, the great ébéniste, shone richly against a backdrop of hand-painted floral silk. Most of the pieces in the gallery had been in Lucius’s and my own personal collection until we donated them to the Muni. The rest I’d bought from private collections in France and at auction in order to complete the various rooms.