by Amy Korman
“George, that ring’s been sitting in the Bests’ house for decades, and no one’s tried to steal it,” I told him airily.
“Well, the Bests haven’t been going around town wearing it, now, have they?” George asked. “Kristin, I think it might be better if I take the ring out of the store. And I don’t think you should be wearing it around town without some kind of insurance.”
That seemed like a good idea. George could take it back to his new, state-of-the-art safe at the Sotheby’s offices over in Haverford, or straight to New York. If anything happened to the ring, I’d feel terrible, even if it wasn’t worth more than the few hundred dollars that the Bests believed its value to be.
“Do you want to take it back to your office?” I asked hopefully.
“I can hold the ring for a few hours in the safe at the office in Haverford,” George said, “but I’d need the owners’ signature to take it to New York. Can you get your neighbors to sign a form that releases the item to Sotheby’s until we can have an expert look it over and figure out what’s what?”
“Sure,” I told him. “I can get the brothers to sign it today, I’m almost positive. Probably by early evening.”
“Great. You get the old guys to sign the release, and I’ll meet you at the club at six,” George said, opening his briefcase, carefully placing the ring in its black leather box inside it, and snapping the case shut. “I’ll take this right over to my office.”
That’d work. I could close the shop at five, take Waffles home, get Hugh’s signature, then get Jimmy to sign the Sotheby’s consignment document as well.
That is, if both brothers were willing to let George take the ring to New York. I couldn’t see why not. It hadn’t been doing them any good moldering away in their house, and they had nothing to lose.
“I’m glad you and Holly didn’t get hurt today when Chef Gianni got shot,” said George, getting up to leave, then turning around with a serious expression on his handsome face. He added, “Be careful. Lot of weird stuff happening around here. Bryn Mawr’s starting to make New York look quiet and uneventful. This town’s full of nut jobs, but who around here is nuts enough to try to kill someone in broad daylight?”
“NUTS?” ASKED JIMMY Best, handing me a bowl of tired-looking peanuts up in his third-floor club apartment. George wanted to head back to New York tonight, and I had only a few minutes to get Jimmy to sign the release and hand it off to George. As expected, Hugh Best had been pleased to hear of Sotheby’s interest in his family jewels (so to speak), and had already signed the document.
Also, just as important, I needed to convince Jimmy to go home, because the club staff was about to evict him. I hadn’t quite figured out how to pry Jimmy out of his secret hideaway, but I was thinking of going with a blunt approach.
I sighed as I gazed into the little dish of nuts. All the cashews and almonds had been picked out. Why bother?
I had been dashing toward the club’s staircase with the Sotheby’s papers in my purse when I bumped into Ronnie on my way upstairs. Usually, Ronnie’s perfectly groomed, but today his eyes were bleary, his shoulders slumped, and his white shirt was rumpled. He looked like a man beaten down by life as he carried a rack of wineglasses down the hallway from the kitchen, headed outdoors to where a couple of staffers were setting up an outside bar by the tennis courts.
“Kristin!” Ronnie said. “Wait a second, please.”
The tennis courts were packed on this sunny late afternoon. There was a tournament going on, which meant that John was probably out there somewhere, I thought with a little thrill. I couldn’t see his lean form anywhere on the first four courts, closest to the porch. But wasn’t that Mariellen Merriwether’s ramrod-straight back I noticed on a bench outside Court 3? I could see pearls gleaming around the woman’s perfectly groomed neck, so it had to be her. I’d done a mental shiver and refocused on Ronnie.
“Are you headed up to see the old man?” Ronnie had asked, pausing to balance the rack of glasses on the banister of the club’s grand front stairs, jerking his thumb in the direction of the third floor. I nodded.
Ronnie, normally so solid and upbeat, reached out and grasped my elbow, with a glazed look in his brown eyes.
“Kristin, please—Jimmy’s gotta go,” he had whispered desperately. “He’s driving us crazy. The constant calls down to the bar. The snacks. The late-night bowling and the ass pinching. Not my ass, the waitresses,” he clarified. “Plus the members are starting to ask questions about weird noises coming from the third floor. I think he sings along to the radio after the Scotch kicks in.”
“I’ll do my best to get him out,” I’d promised Ronnie.
“If he doesn’t leave willingly tomorrow, we’re throwing him out.”
Now that I was up in Jimmy’s apartment, I understood why Ronnie was at his breaking point: Things were deteriorating quickly. The apartment had taken on a distinctively depressing scent of stale smoke and Scotch. It was cocktail hour and Jimmy was still in his bathrobe, the bed was unmade, and his lunch tray hadn’t been picked up yet. Clearly, the staff wasn’t being quite as attentive on day four of Jimmy’s stay as they’d been initially, and Jimmy’s cute-old-man gimmick was wearing thin.
Jimmy himself didn’t seem all that thrilled to be here anymore, either, to be honest. He wore the slightly manic, overtired look of a kid who’s been sent to stay with fun, rule-free relatives while his parents are off in Europe—a kid who can’t wait to get home to boring old Mom and Dad after a week of staying up too late watching TV and eating candy for dinner.
While Jimmy poured us both a drink, I explained to him that George wanted to take the ring up to New York, and that he’d need to sign a release, which Hugh had already done. “Fine, fine,” Jimmy said grumpily, taking the paper and adding his signature. He sat on the window seat and looked outside. “Wouldn’t mind being out there and watching the tennis matches,” he groused. “Getting a little stuffy up here.”
This was all way too Flowers in the Attic, I thought. Time for tough love.
“Jimmy, you have to go home tomorrow,” I told him. “Ronnie said the members are starting to get suspicious,” I added, truthfully, “and he can’t risk getting fired.”
Jimmy looked simultaneously irked and relieved.
“People are too damn nosy around this club,” he complained, straightening the belt on his bathrobe. “If they’d mind their own business, no one would notice anything going on up here. But I wouldn’t want Ronnie to lose his job. And the staff’s slacking off quite a bit, as you can see. So I guess I’ll go home tomorrow.”
“Great!” I told him. “Hugh will be so happy to see you.”
“Rumor has it that our crack local police force finally found the weapon used to hit Barclay Shields?” Jimmy said, sipping his drink.
I tasted mine and winced. Scotch again. Still, I took another gulp. When in Rome, I told myself.
“Ronnie heard it from your friend Bootsie at lunch, and he told me when he brought up my tray,” Jimmy informed me. “The weapon makes Honey Potts look guilty, of course, but I’ve known Honey a long time, and she ain’t the violent type. I used to date her when we were teenagers.”
“You did?” I said, shocked.
“Sure,” he said. “Honey was very attractive, believe it or not. Tall, blond, athletic. She always had a tan, which unfortunately now has the consistency of a boot, but back when she was seventeen, it looked fantastic.”
“So why didn’t you and Honey end up together?” I asked Jimmy.
“We broke up during college, and she married Phil Edwards in 1966. Boring guy. A banker from Chester County,” he said. “I knew she wasn’t all that crazy about him, because she never took his last name and she never moved out of Sanderson to go live with Phil. Made him move in with her and her parents. And later that year, I married Darleen, my first waitress. Darleen was an Angie Dickinson look-alike. Gorgeous girl, very sexy, and one of the first in town to wear miniskirts in
the late sixties. Honey was more like Doris Day.”
“What went wrong with Darleen?” I asked.
“She had an affair with Phil Edwards,” Jimmy replied simply.
“She slept with Honey’s husband? That’s terrible,” I said, shocked.
“Well, it wasn’t ideal,” he conceded, snipping the end from a cigar and lighting up, “but I think it was worse for Honey. Embarrassing for her, really. They split up, and she stayed on at Sanderson.”
“What happened to Darleen?”
“We got divorced, after I paid her forty thousand dollars to go away,” he said, then paused to blow a smoke ring. “Which was a lot of money in those days. Between my marriages and Hugh’s useless business ventures, we managed to bankrupt ourselves in the most entertainingly stupid ways possible.”
He glanced out his open window. “Honey was out there earlier,” he said, “watching tennis with that uptight bitch Mariellen Merriwether. Now that’s one woman whose husband couldn’t stay put. Soon as they had their daughter, Lilly, Martin took off for South America and was never seen again. And there were some good reasons why he didn’t want to come back. I’ve been watching Mariellen from up here over the past few days, and she is one tough gal. Overly focused on that daughter of hers.”
“I better get downstairs to meet George,” I said, peering over his shoulder at the grass courts.
There was John Hall!
He was in the middle of a tennis match, hitting the ball at about one hundred miles per hour to his opponent, who looked a lot younger and faster, but was still struggling to return John’s hit. I admired John’s great arms in his white polo shirt for a minute, feeling a pang of regret that I’d never be able to (a) check out his biceps close-up and (b) understand how, or why, people get that good at tennis.
Then I glanced at my watch, and grabbed the Sotheby’s contract from Jimmy’s coffee table.
“So you’re going home tomorrow morning?” I prompted Jimmy.
“Guess so,” he conceded. “I’ll be home in time for one of Hugh’s awful casseroles for lunch. If it’s tuna-noodle, I’m going to hit myself in the head with a bookend.”
Chapter 19
DOWNSTAIRS, I PEEKED into the bar, didn’t see George, and went over to the window by the front porch to look for him on the patio, where I was poleaxed by the sight of a shocking duo at the front table.
Honey Potts and Holly were sitting together, chatting away, a bottle of Mumm in an ice bucket between them. What had me reeling, though, wasn’t the odd pairing of Honey, the doyenne of Sanderson, and Holly, the younger heiress, but the fact that Holly was wearing khakis. They were perfectly cut, skinny beige pants that looked like jodhpurs, but were still khakis. Her shirt was a white button-down in gorgeous Egyptian cotton, cut very narrow and rather low. She had on almost no makeup, flat beige sandals, and she looked amazing. But it was unnerving to see Holly looking so toned down.
Honey, meanwhile, had on a yellow polo shirt that was boxy and none too flattering, and a pair of green Bermuda shorts. So, actually, Holly’s outfit didn’t look anything like Honey Potts’s, but obviously Holly isn’t going to wear green Bermuda shorts.
I hovered there at the window for a second, gaping at this strange pairing. It was like stumbling on Darth Vader and Yoda sitting down for a nice cocktail together. Suddenly, I felt a large, very strong hand grab my arm. I looked down and saw hockey muscles, so I knew it was Bootsie.
“What are those two doing together?” she whispered.
“Exchanging recipes?” I guessed.
Bootsie, keeping one eye on Holly and Honey, told me that she’d just gotten off the tennis courts, where she’d been beaten in the club tournament by Lilly Merriwether, and she wasn’t too happy about it. Bootsie had grumpily packed up her stuff and was on her way to her car when she’d just happened to stroll by the porch to see if anything was happening. Then again, Bootsie checks all the aisles of the Publix and trolls her sons’ Gymboree classes in the pursuit of gossip. And here was something finally worth watching.
“What’s Holly wearing? She looks like Country Club Barbie,” hissed Bootsie. “Let’s go out there and sit with them.”
Firmly in Bootsie’s steely grip, I was dragged to Holly’s table as I frantically scanned the porch for Mariellen. Thankfully, she was nowhere to be seen. Probably she was congratulating Lilly on her tennis triumph, and trying to figure out a way to get her daughter back together with John.
“Champagne?” asked Holly, waving at us to sit down, then introducing us to Honey. “Kristin lives right across the street from you!” she added to Honey, who shook my hand politely enough with her leathery paw, but appeared to take zero notice of me, or connect me with finding Barclay Shields at Sanderson.
“I’ve met Mrs. Potts dozens of times,” Bootsie bragged. “She knows Mummy from school.”
“Ungh,” said Honey, who was mid–crab cake, and didn’t seem too interested in this nugget of information. Meanwhile, I looked around for George so I could hand off the Sotheby’s release and leave.
“You might have seen Kristin around your property with her dog,” Bootsie said, as I gave her a swift kick in the shin under the table. Of course, she kept talking. “She has a drooling, disgusting basset hound that she’s obsessed with. Kristin was there when your cow guy found Barclay Shields at your place!” At this, Honey looked up from her crab cake, and leveled a none-too-friendly gaze upon me, while I silently cursed Bootsie. I also realized Bootsie might have downed a post-tennis cocktail or two already. She seemed a little drunk.
“Honey and I started chatting while we were watching the tennis matches this afternoon,” Holly said, ignoring Bootsie, “and she was telling me about the old days when the club used to actually be fun. Then we came up here for a drink, and on the way to our table, I innocently flirted with old Mr. Conwell over there for a minute. He’s such a charming old man. He even asked me to sit in his lap, but then his wife showed up.”
“Best thing to happen to old Conwell for years!” Honey hooted. She looked fondly at Holly. The look that Mrs. Conwell, an attractive eighty-year-old, was shooting at our table from across the porch was not quite as fond. She looked like she’d like to come over and punch Holly’s lights out with one of her large diamond rings.
“You remind me of me when I was young!” Honey added.
Holly looked alarmed at this, but smiled at Honey, and said, “Let’s have some more champagne.”
“I gotta hit the loo,” said Honey, rising from the table. “Get me a vodka, will you, Holly? I can’t do champagne after 6 p.m. Hangover isn’t worth it.”
“Vodka coming right up!” said Holly, waving cheerfully at the waiter. “And Honey, I’m ordering you Grey Goose this time. That Smirnoff you’re drinking is so 1974, and not in a good way. The Goose tastes so much better.”
“Okay.” Honey shrugged and ambled off toward the ladies’ room.
“What’s up with your outfit?” I asked Holly. “You look totally J. Crew meets L.L. Bean, but better.”
“That’s because I’m not wearing L.L. Bean,” Holly told me and Bootsie.
“I love L.L. Bean,” said Bootsie, affronted.
“L.L. Bean looks fantastic on you, Bootsie,” Holly said, “because you’re so tall.” Bootsie looked less offended at this. “I decided to go with the Neiman Marcus version of L.L. Bean, which is Hermès.”
I decided not to even try to guess how much Holly’s outfit had cost. While my mind reeled at the quantity of poultry profits that Holly directed into the coffers of Neiman’s, I suddenly heard a familiar noise: The clomping of horseshoes on pavement from the club driveway, punctuated by a loud whinny.
I looked up, horror-stricken. Mariellen had Norman’s reins in hand and was walking him straight toward a massive, leafy oak tree near the porch. She must be moving her prized horse into the shade, I realized. Luckily, she was totally focused on murmuring sweet nothings into Norman’s velvety brown ears, and hadn’t
seen us. I jumped up and almost knocked over George, who was just arriving at our table.
Without preamble, I handed over the signed contract. As Bootsie started to ask questions about the paperwork, I got up and grabbed my handbag.
“Have a wonderful night!” I said, zooming across the porch toward the back door before Mariellen could finish tethering Norman to his tree. Thank goodness the club building is so enormous: The left wing completely blocked me and my car from Mariellen and Norman. I was scrambling into my car when I heard a man’s voice call out my name.
It was John, smiling, and carrying his tennis racket, a leather gym bag, and the giant men’s championship silver tennis cup toward his SUV.
“Hey!” He held up the tennis trophy. “Just won the men’s club championship. Want to help me celebrate?”
I DID, OF course, so when John suggested I follow him home to the condo he was renting in Haverford, I did just that. Ten minutes later, he opened the door, and four mutts rushed out at us wagging and making a beeline for a common yard space behind the condo building. “Sorry,” said John apologetically. “This place is kind of a dump. It’s not easy to find a landlord who will rent to you when you have four dogs.”
The pack returned, he poured kibble into bowls, then popped the cork on a bottle of Taittinger with a satisfying thunk. Then he poured half the bottle into the club’s silver tennis cup, held it up happily, and handed it to me, gesturing to me to chug the bubbly straight out of the trophy.
“Drink up!” he said, while all four dogs jumped up on the sofa. There were two small beige mixes who liked like they were mostly Chihuahua, one white fluffy giant dog of no discernible breed, and what I think was mostly bulldog. They seemed like one big happy dog family.
“Won’t champagne tarnish the trophy?” I asked, looking inside the cup, which was about seventy-five years old and none too clean.
“Yeah, but it’s tradition,” John said happily. “I’ve tried to win this thing for fifteen years, and we’re going to drink out of it if it kills me. To be honest, I only won this year because the club’s two best players are both injured. I beat a seventy-two-year-old and a sixteen-year-old to win this cup, but it’s still worth celebrating.”