A week later, I spotted Detective Shreve out of the corner of my eye as I was sitting at my desk taking a phone order for twenty Laz-Z-Girl recliners for a nursing home in Rochester. I gave Shreve a tentative little wave as he strolled over to my desk and perched himself on the corner. Completing the paperwork, I hung up the phone and forced a smile.
“Hello, Detective Shreve. Should I be worried that you’re here?”
“I came by because I have some news for you and I wanted to tell you in person.”
“Oh, I hope it’s something good.” Here it comes, I thought, expecting him to get out the handcuffs.
“We got the results of the autopsy.”
I held my breath.
“Countess de Passy had traces of a Flunitrazepam in her system.”
“What’s that?”
“A powerful relaxant used in the short-term treatment of insomnia. It’s known here as the date-rape drug. She had an old prescription of it around from France under the name Rotinal. It makes people woozy. Remember? Just like you said she was. That must have been the medicine she showed you. Your fingerprints were on the vial.”
“Oh my . . .”
“And something else,” he said, pausing. “Apparently you weren’t the only one she confided in about being ill.”
“I wasn’t?”
“No. It seems that a lot of people knew it. A lot of her friends anyway. Everyone except Mr. Nathaniel.”
“No kidding. She made me swear on my life I wouldn’t tell a soul.” I shook my head in amazement.
“Mrs. Kahn knew it. Mrs. Waterman. Mrs. Bromire. That gossip column lady—what’s her name?”
“Miranda Somers?”
“No, Mindy something.”
“Eve Mindy?”
“Yeah, her. It’s in her column tomorrow.”
Clearly, June had done her work.
“Well, I just don’t know what to say, Detective. Does this mean she could have killed herself?”
“It’s interesting you should ask that because she was right.”
“Who was right?”
“Your pal, the Countess. She was afraid she had cancer? Well, she did.”
“What?”
“Have cancer. Just like she thought.”
I could hardly believe my ears. “What?”
“She definitely should have gone to a doctor sooner. She had breast cancer.”
I blinked twice in utter disbelief.
“She did?”
“A large lump. Could’ve been treated maybe. Pity. Never said a word to Mr. Nathaniel.”
“She didn’t?”
“Nope. Poor guy’s in shock. What’s that they say about the husband always being the last to know? The fiancé in this case. Anyway, this explains her behavior.”
“Yes . . . Yes, it does.”
Nate Nathaniel wasn’t the only one in shock.
“We’ll probably never know whether she took her own life or whether she accidentally fell because the drug took effect. But I think it’s fairly safe to say that you’re no longer a suspect, Mrs. Slater.”
“I’m not?”
“Nope.”
“And the will? Has that been resolved?” I asked tentatively.
“The lawyer who supervised the signing, Ms. McCluskey, swears that the woman who came to her office that day was Countess de Passy. She says she knows this for certain because she was introduced to the Countess at a cocktail party once.”
I remembered Oliva telling me how McCluskey had told her she had seen her across the room at a cocktail party. I imagined that in order to protect her reputation McCluskey was now claiming she had actually met Monique so she could not be blamed for unwittingly abetting the signing of a fraudulent will.
“We have the bill she sent the Countess at her home,” Shreve went on. “She’s a confident woman, Ms. McCluskey. A good choice of a lawyer . . . And I couldn’t find anyone who’d seen the two of you together after lunch. In short, they’d have a hard time making a case against you, Mrs. Slater. You’re exonerated.”
“I am?” I was still hearing the word “exonerated.” “I mean, I am. Yes. Well, I should be. Good. Yes. It’s what I’ve been saying all along.”
“I gotta tell you something, Mrs. Slater.”
“What?”
“I thought you were guilty.”
“You did?”
He looked at me closely with a vaguely amused expression on his face. “Now I’m not so sure.”
“Well . . . Thank you for bringing me that lovely news, Detective. I hope we meet again under pleasanter circumstances.”
He shook my hand and held it for a longer moment than necessary. “I have no doubt we’ll meet again, Mrs. Slater. No doubt at all. And in a professional capacity.” He turned to go, then stopped and turned back for a moment.
“Oh, by the way, congratulations,” he said.
I thought he was congratulating me on having gotten away with murder. But then he added: “I understand you’re about to become a very rich woman. Again.”
Chapter 38
Monique’s memorial service two weeks later was held at St. Thomas More, a small Catholic Church tucked away on an Upper East Side side street. The pretty little church, so conveniently located, had a long history of illustrious social funerals to its credit. Nate Nathaniel, the grieving fiancé, organized the event himself. At considerable expense, he’d hired Trebor Bellini to decorate the church, which was uncharacteristic of Nate because he was such a skinflint. I thought he’d only done it for appearances, but when I saw him that day, he seemed genuinely broken up over Monique’s death, or perhaps over my exoneration, or both. I didn’t really care.
Instead of the traditional flowers, Bellini filled the church with bunches of brilliantly colored autumn leaves. He even scattered them on the stone floor. As he told June Kahn: “I made it fall in honor of a fall . . . I want people to feel like they’re walking into an autumn wood that just happens to have pews.”
Le tout New York showed up, including many people who didn’t like Monique but for whom funerals, like weddings, were social occasions not to be missed. The Kahns, the Watermans, the Dents, the Lowrys, Miranda Somers, Ethan Monk, Nicky Brubetskoi, Eve Mindy, and many, many others all paid their last respects to this faded comet—and to one another, while they were at it. Their grief, if not heartfelt, was at least polite.
Nate gave an endless eulogy. At one point, an irate Betty leaned in and whispered to me: “He’s talked longer than she lived, for Christ sakes.”
After the service, Nate and I walked out of the church together. It was a cold spring day. An unseasonable wind whipped our clothes as we stood on the curb. I held my hat to keep it from blowing off.
“Funny how you can live with a person and never really know them,” Nate said, rubbing his rat-red eyes with a soggy white linen handkerchief.
“Tell me about it,” I said.
“She never said a thing to me, Jo, not a thing. Nothing about the drugs, nothing about the will, nothing about being sick. I guess that explains why she refused to marry me for so long. She had so many secrets. Everyone but me knew. I know now exactly how you must have felt about Lucius.”
“Thank you, Nate. It’s very big of you to admit that.”
“Friends?” he said, extending his hand.
“Amis mondains,” I said, shaking it.
He stared hard at me with an air of weary resignation, then scuttled away toward a waiting limousine.
Eventually, I received all monies and property from Monique’s estate. I paid off my creditors and the rest of my pledge to the Municipal Museum. I gave Charlie what I owed him for the necklace. I paid Betty back her ten thousand and bought her a sapphire clip from Pearce as interest. I paid the workrooms and the lawyers. In short, I settled all my debts. I sold the New York apartment. I never wanted to set foot in it again. I bought another one, even bigger, in a building up the block. I moved back into my house in Southampton and rehired Caspar and other member
s of the staff—except dear Mrs. Mathilde, who said she preferred to remain in Jamaica with her grandchildren.
Miranda Somers did a profile of me for the January 2001 issue of Nous magazine, with the amusingly macabre title, “Jo Slater Looks at Life.” The long piece was accompanied by a flattering photograph of me wearing a creamy white linen suit, holding a single pink rose, a conscious echo of the Vigée-Lebrun portrait of Marie Antoinette in her muslin dress, which had so outraged the silk manufacturers of Lyons. At first glance, there appears to be a glint of triumph in my expression. People remarked to me how well I appeared in that picture. If only they’d looked at it a little closer, they would have seen not triumph but a hardened sadness set deep into my eyes. I wanted to say to them: You’re not looking at glory. You’re looking at someone who knows she is a murderess and wishes it were otherwise.
Dare I confess it? I missed Monique. I missed the object of my obsession. In killing the Countess, I had killed a part of myself.
Freedom from my obsession was disorienting. It was hard to stop looking in the mirror for my definition, to stop using Monique’s direction for my compass, to stop plotting my life around her death. The worst thing she took away from me turned out to be herself. It was the one thing I had trouble replacing.
When anyone tried to curry favor with me by saying something nasty about Monique, I always told them: “Tell me what you criticize and I’ll tell you who you are.”
Try as I did to resume my old life, something inside me had changed. My innocence had gone. I no longer viewed the world with the same rapt enthusiasm. The New York I knew and loved seemed to me now to be nothing but a conjuror’s trick, the figment of a collective imagination, an exquisite card castle constructed to ward off demons. But illusory or not, it was still the most exciting place in the world.
Chapter 39
New York is a great place to hide and be seen at the same time. In that spirit, I organized a masked ball at the Municipal Museum, calling it Le Bal de la Reine, in honor of Marie Antoinette.
The four hundred hand-calligraphied invitations were accompanied by my signature white rose in a Baccarat bud vase. It was the first big event of the season. Trebor Bellini outdid himself with the decorations on an unlimited budget.
I surveyed my courtiers from behind my mask. “Jo’s Four Hundred”—like old Mrs. Astor’s Four Hundred—was what the press had dubbed us.
I wore a dress of red and silver, the Queen’s colors. The hoop skirt, with its flounces of silver lamé, was so enormous, I had to turn sideways to edge through ordinary doors. The museum’s magnificent halls and generous archways afforded me the chance to stride along straight ahead like a galleon in full sail, making a grand entrance wherever I went. I sported a high white wig with a replica of the Statue of Liberty nestled into the hair—an homage to my own freedom and to the fashionable women of the eighteenth century who celebrated famous events and victories through their coiffures.
Everyone was there. Everyone had made an effort. It wasn’t every day the Municipal Museum opened up the Slater Gallery and the Great Hall for a private party. No last-minute cancellations this time. People were desperate to be invited, calling up at the last minute: Could I please fit them in? And I did. Perhaps it was a narcissistic wish for my old enemies to see me prosper. But whatever the reason, I excluded no one, not even the Dents.
It was what Betty Waterman referred to as “a vault occasion,” where women opened up their safe-deposit boxes and got out the really great jewels—the ones that were too expensive to insure all year round, the ones reserved for spectacular parties where all the women tried to outdo one another. I, of course, was wearing the Marie Antoinette necklace—not the real one, which had been broken to bits in the alley, but a replica my darling Eugenie Pourtant had made for me with the salvageable stones. It shone even more brightly because it was new and mostly fake. The original had glowed from within. The copy sparkled under the lights. Only an expert could have told the difference.
It’s always best to be kind and forgiving when fortune lifts you up. If your time comes, you must be magnanimous in victory—a good queen. I invited Nate Nathaniel. He came as Talleyrand, telling everyone that treason was a “matter of dates.” Miranda Somers was there, playfully dressed as a shepherdess, which her devoted social flock found very amusing. Dick Bromire came as Ben Franklin, Trish as Madame du Barry. Roger Lowry came as Lafayette. My dear friend Eugenie Pourtant flew in from Paris and came as Madame Vigée Lebrun, Marie Antoinette’s official portrait painter. The Dents came as Napoléon and Josephine. They both looked too tall and out of period. June came as Madame de Pompadour—wrong king, June, but who cares? Charlie came as Necker, the finance minister. Ethan Monk came as Axel Fersen, Marie Antoinette’s great love. Gil Waterman came as David, the painter. Betty came as the fictional Madame Defarge and kept poking people in the behind with her knitting needles. She asked me point-blank: “How the hell could you have invited all these people who shit on you when you were down?”
“Social life,” I shrugged.
I was on the lookout for one guest in particular: Mr. Brad Thompson. Brad called me shortly after Monique’s memorial service. He said he’d like us to get together. I was feeling so depressed at the time that I actually put him off. But now I was ready. It was gratifying to know that I still had some oomph left in me. What a formidable team we would make. I figured I could polish up that rough diamond given half a chance. He was late for the party but he finally showed up wearing a tuxedo and no mask—so reminiscent of Lucius. I liked his attitude. I seated him on my right.
At dinner, the winter scene of spun sugar adorning the two U-shaped tables in the Great Hall each seating two hundred guests slowly melted into a spring scene—just as in the eighteenth century. Only then men with blowers sat under the huge tables to melt the sugar. Trebor Bellini had designed something much more cost-effective and efficient: heaters on timers. There was applause as each course arrived, brought in on silver trays by liveried footmen.
During dessert, Nicky Brubetskoi, who came as Peter the Great, dressed in a glorious blue velvet doublet festooned with ribbons and medals and orders given to his family by various real tsars, toasted me as “New York’s Queen.”
Everyone stood up to salute me.
The talk of the evening was how Dick Bromire had suddenly been indicted. No one could believe it. We all thought Dick was home free. The news had been splashed over the front page of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times that very morning. And, of course, the party was livelier on account of that. Society had another scandal to move on to. I was history now.
I was sad for Dick and Trish, but they were both there at the party, laughing and talking, as if nothing at all were amiss. I knew they’d get through it. We all managed to get through these things somehow.
After dinner, I danced with Brad. He adored the party. We talked about all the places we wanted to visit in the world. He told me he’d take me wherever I liked on his private plane, starting with London, where we would go to all the plays. It couldn’t have been a more perfect evening, except for one little thing . . .
As Brad and I were dancing, a slender man in a full-face white mask walked toward us. He was dressed like a French Revolutionary, wearing a simple gray waistcoat, matching breeches, white stockings, black buckled shoes, hair pulled back in a ponytail, and a black tricorn hat. He carried an ebony cane, the top of which was a gold eagle with ruby eyes. He tapped Brad with the cane, cutting in on him for a dance with me.
“Citizen Robespierre, I presume?” I said to the lithe young man, wondering who this striking figure was.
The man lifted his mask for an instant.
It wasn’t a man.
It was Oliva.
“We have some business to discuss,” she said.
She bowed slightly to me, backed away, and drifted off into the crowd. It took me several seconds to compose myself. Of course, somewhere in the recesses of my mind I’d always known she
’d show up again. But now that she was here, I felt . . . How did I feel? Not exactly afraid . . . More apprehensive.
How much did she want? A million dollars? More, perhaps. What form would this blackmail take? Would it be a one-shot thing? Or would it go on and on forever? God knows I was grateful to her. I couldn’t have done it without her. Still, I hoped for both our sakes that she wouldn’t make any unreasonable demands.
I scanned the crowd, but she was gone. At first I refused to let dark thoughts mar my triumph. I wanted this night to be a memorable one for all my guests and for me. As I ate and drank and danced throughout the evening, flirting with Brad, gossiping with everyone just like old times, I knew that I was in my element.
I enjoyed myself but I confess I grew more worried as the night wore on. Oliva was lurking around somewhere like a threatening cloud on my clear horizon and I knew I was going to have to deal with her one day. I’d just have to try to reason with her, that’s all. Maybe even befriend her, like I’d befriended Monique. Looking on the bright side, I had a new focus in my life.
The party broke up around two. Brad offered to take me home. We walked outside together. The façade of the museum was all lit up. Brad went in search of his car. As I waited for him in front of the entrance, I wondered if Oliva was out there in the night waiting for me. A dark thought flitted like a bat across my mind, but I repressed it. Oh well . . . I spotted Brad signaling to me from the back of his big black limousine.
I took a deep breath and walked down the wide stone steps, inhaling the sweet air of the city that is my home. I felt like a queen. I’m Jo Slater again, I thought. And I belong here. I do.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful for the support of all my friends, several of whom read this book in its various drafts and offered perceptive comments. I particularly want to thank: John Novogrod, a gifted lawyer with a literary sensibility, who was instrumental in guiding me through the legal aspects of the story; Linda Fairstein, a generous friend who is always willing to share the vast knowledge she has acquired as Chief of Manhattan’s Sex Crimes Unit with a fellow novelist; and finally, Jonathan Burnham, a steadfast and brilliant editor, with a perfect sense of humor and proportion, who just kept believing.
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