"Am I? How marvelous. George is such a dear."
"John," the fat lady corrected.
"John? Did I actually marry John?"
"Jonn Spangler," Remo said. "The senator."
She burst into peals of laughter. "But that's too divine! i married the senator. Wait until my friends hear about it. Here, have a cookie." She offered the bag to Remo. "Not a big one. The big ones are for me. Just wet your finger and stick it to a few crumbs."
"I'll pass," Remo said. "Mrs. Spangler, I'd really like to talk to you about Thornton Ives, the Secretary of the Navy. He was a guest at your party last night."
"Now you're wasting your time," she said firmly.
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"Whoever this Thornton Ives is, he's no husband of mine. I would never marry a secretary. What kind of diamonds can a secretary afford?"
"He was the Secretary of the Navy. An admiral or something."
"Oh," she said. "That's different, I do love shipboard romances. Has he sent you to ask for my hand?"
"He's dead, ma'am. Somebody murdered him last night outside this house. With a bayonet."
"What a shame," Mrs. Spangler sighed. "A honeymoon on board a yacht would have been divine. Charles and Di adored theirs. Now do be off, my dear. There's a good boy," she said, shuffling Remo out the door. "If I miss my plane, I'll be absolutely brokenhearted. Such a bother, traveling to airports like this. My third husband-or maybe it was the sixth-had his own plane. I should have stayed with him. Ralph was so sweet. I mean Richard. I'm sure it was Richard. He gave me a lovely diamond for our one-week wedding anniversary. Well, no matter." She patted Remo on the shoulder. "Do stay in touch, darling. It was divine while it lasted. I'll never love another man like you again." She kissed him briefly on his cheek and brushed past the fat lady without a word on her way to the waiting limo. A moment later the car was whooshing down the curving drive.
Remo stood in silence. It was broken shortly by rude laughter! The fat lady beside him pressed the door back into place with a final whack, her sides shaking with mirth.
"Very funny," Remo said.
"I can tell you've never been here before. Hoo."
"Hoo, yourself. Who else is around?"
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"No one. Just me."
"The senator?"
"He's already at the farm. Mother's gone to join him."
"Mother?" Remo asked. "Who's mother?"
"The dizzy broad who just left. That's Mama. Mater. Mommie Dearest. Mammy. The vine which has yielded the tender grape standing before you. Me."
Remo looked at the woman incredulously. She was easily twice the age of the cookie-eating doll who got into the limo. "You mean she's your stepmother or something," Remo said.
"My real mother, Bozo," she shouted. She scraped some dried egg off her coveralls with a filthy thumbnail. "I guess I don't look much like a senator's daughter," she said more somberly.
"Look," Remo said. "You can be anybody's daughter you want to be." The world was full of hooples. "Just tell me where I can find-this person-Cecilia Spangler."
"Quit treating me like a fruitcake," she said, her hands resting on her vast hips. "The Spanglers have one daughter, and that's Cecilia, and that's me. But I don't care if you want to talk to me or not, because I'm not going to talk to you. So make like an egg and beat it."
Just then a black maid stepped into the vestibule. "Telephone for you, Miss Spangler."
"Tell whoever it is I'm busy. Tell them I'm dead. I don't care. Neither will they."
"Yes, Miss."
"Probably some charity looking for money. Nobody else calls me," she said.
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Remo looked back at the retreating figure of the maid. "Are you really Cecilia Spangler?"
"I told you who I was. Which is more than you've done. Remo who?"
"Remo Williams. A friend of a friend."
"Friend of whose?"
"Of yours," Remo lied.
"Can it, reporter. I don't have friends who have friends who look like you. Only mother has those friends. And they're all at the same place she is."
"Where's that?"
"Some fat farm or something," Cecilia said, waving the thought away. "She goes there every month. She claims that's how she and daddy stay so young. Big deal. I don't care how she looks. I don't care how I look. I know I'm a pig, and I don't care, see?" Her teeth were bared.
"Fine," Remo said placatingly. "You don't have to get nasty."
"Of course I have to get nasty. Wouldn't you be nasty if your mother looked like your daughter and you looked like everybody's fat maiden aunt?"
"I wouldn't know," Remo said. "I never thought about it." He tweaked her left earlobe. It was one of the 52 steps to sexual ecstasy Chiun had taught him. If anything made women talk, the left earlobe did it. "I'm not a reporter," he said softly, feeling her squirm beneath his touch. "But I've got to ask you some questions about the murder on your lawn last night."
"That feels wonderful," she said, shivering.
"The guy who got killed was the Secretary of the Navy. Did you know that?" He moved slowly toward the inside of her elbows. In the teachings of Sinanju, the rigid sequence of steps had to be followed pre-
41
cisely. Each step slowly aroused the woman to the heights of physical pleasure, until she was broken and consumed and satisfied.
Remo had pleasured many women for many purposes. Not all of the women had been desirable, and his purposes were rarely spurred by his own desire. But women always performed the way he expected them to under the guidance of his skillful hands. They took the pleasure he gave them, and in return they offered him whatever he needed-information, time, complicity.
He hated it. Love was never a question. Neither was pleasure, for Remo. He had ceased deriving pleasure from the act long ago. It was just part of his job, along with watching women like Cecilia Spangler-hurt, long forgotten, ugly girls who were never touched with sincerity or affection and knew it and didn't care any more. Remo felt dirty.
"Of course I knew who he was. I was the one who called the FBI. Everybody else was too drunk. What are you doing to my elbow?"
"Tell me what you know about him. Ives. The Secretary of the Navy." Get it over with, he thought.
"Thornton Ives," she said quietly. "He was a nice man. ... He was old. He let himself get old. I liked that." A tear welled up in one eye and rolled down the side of her face. "Please," she said. "Please stop that."
Remo was genuinely surprised. "Why? Don't you like it?"
"Oh, I like it all right," she said. "But sooner or later you'll find out that I don't know anything, and then you'll get mad and call me a fat pig. That's what reporters usually do with me."
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"I told you, I'm not a reporter," Remo said, exasperated. He took her hand. "And I wouldn't do that to you."
She squeezed her eyes shut. "I don't Know anything about the murder. I don't know who, I don't know why, I don't know anything except where, because it was in my front yard, and I wanted to keep things quiet because Admiral lves was the only one of Mother's and Daddy's friends who didn't treat me like I was an embarrassment to the family." She stood up and paced around the room, looking like a miserable, shaggy farm animal.
"I was never even invited to their parties, here in my own house. Mother was so afraid somebody would take a look at me and figure out that she's fifty-eight years old. But Admiral !ves didn't care. He could have stayed young. He had the money. But he didn't. He was normal He was the only normal person who ever came to this zoo."
She turned to Remo in a rage. "So don't waste your time seducing me. It won't be worth it."
"You're pretty sharp, aren't you?"
She sat down next to him, her red-rimmed eyes sullen. Slowly they kindled with the beginnings of a smile. "It was a pretty ridiculous pretense, acting like you wanted me." , "I'm sorry, Cecilia," Remo said.
"it's all right. It's been done before. And my pride isn't hol
ding me back or anything." She laughed softly. "What pride? I'll take anything I can get, usually. But not over this. Thornton Ives was worth more to me than a quick feel. Although I must say you're awfully good at it."
Remo smiled.
"You think I'm crazy, don't you?"
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"No," he said softly. "I don't. I think you're less crazy than your mother, for what that's worth. And I think you have more pride than you give yourself credit for."
Cecilia blew her nose into a used Kleenex from her pocket. "You're all right, too. Too bad you're a reporter."
"Once and for all, I'm not a reporter. I can't tell you who I work for. All I can say is that there are no police on this case, so if you don't help me out, we're all going to lose a lot of time. It's too bad that Ives is dead, but we're dealing with more than just one murder."
"Two," Cecilia said. "The Secretary of the Air Force bought the farm yesterday."
"Okay. And you didn't call the FBI instead of the cops just because you forgot the precinct phone number."
She looked at Remo for a long moment. "You really on our side?" she asked.
"I am. Will you help me?"
She shrugged. "If I can. What do you want?"
"A guest list. From the party last night."
"There's one in the library. I'll get it for you."
The list contained more than a hundred names. "Any idea where I should start?"
"It won't take long. Most of the people on that list won't be at home, anyway. They're all over at the fat farm with Mother and Daddy."
"Where's that?"
"I couldn't tell you. I was never invited there. It's not important, anyway. Just some clinic in Pennsylvania, like the ones in Switzerland, only closer. Mud baths, tonic, carrots for dinner, that kind of thing. That's what Mother tells me, anyway."
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"And the others? Would anyone especially want to kill Admiral Ives?"
"Sure," Cecilia said. "The Russians, the Libyans, the PLO, the Red Brigades, the Baader Meinhof, the Red Chinese, you name it. He was the secretary of the navy, you know."
"You can drop the sarcasm," Remo said. "I get enough of that at home."
"Oh? You got a mother, too?"
"You might say that."
She showed him to the door and swung it open with a grunt. "Thanks," Remo said. "If 1 kissed you goodbye, would you get upset?"
She smiled. "Try me."
He touched her lips lightly. She blushed. "I don't suppose you'd like to start with the left earlobe again," she said.
Chapter Four
The first eighteen names on the Spangler's guest list were out of town. Since he'd exhausted the Washington, Virginia, and Maryland numbers, Remo went on to the New York City addresses.
Number nineteen was Bobby Jay, a name Remo recalled from years of listening to Chiun's television blasting while Remo was doing his exercises. Bobby Jay, according to his TV commercials, was one of the world's outstanding voices, kriown so far only to the discerning tastes of Europeans, but now available to Americans through a special TV offer. His records, according to the announcer, were not sold in stores, a fact gratefully acknowledged by millions, since Bobby Jay was, to all intents and purposes, tone deaf.
Back from a recent engagement at Phil's Steak House in Atlantic City, Bobby Jay himself answered the door in the Manhattan penthouse apartment. He was around thirty, with coiffed hair and the kind of boyish, unlined face that bespoke a lifetime of fighting off anything resembling intelligent thought.
"Hey, good-iookin', what you got cookin'?" he crooned tunelessly in greeting, snapping his fingers off the beat.
45
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From the decor of the room, which consisted of sculpture, paintings, needlepoint, and other media depicting the backsides of naked man, Remo got the distinct impression that Bobby Jay was going to burst into a torrent of lisping in a matter of seconds.
He was right.
"Honey, are you the ethcort?"
"I'm the stranger," Remo said. "And I'd like to keep it that way."
Bobby Jay's eyes scanned the physique of the young man who stood in front of him, wearing chinos and a black T-shirt. "You mean you're not here to drive me to the airport?" he asked.
"Don't tell me you're leaving town, too."
"Everybody who's anybody is, darling. Oh, pooh. Where is that boy? I'm so annoyed I could spit." The lisp had changed to a slight whistle. He plopped down on a gigantic white sofa bordered with freshly cut calla lilies. "Come and sit down beside me. You'll make me feel better."
"Buddy, if I end up on that sofa next to you, I can guarantee you won't feel better."
"Well, I never. Who are you, anyway? Some kind of burglar or something? In that cute little T-shirt? It's January, macho man."
"I'm not a burglar. I want to ask you some questions about the party last night."
"Who, Elwood? That was nothing. It was just one of those things. . ." he sang.
"The party at the Spanglers."
". . Just one of those fabulous flings. . ."
Remo clapped Bobby Jay's arm behind him in a hammerlock.
"Oh, you big brute," Bobby said, batting his eyelashes.
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"I don't want singing. I want talking."
"Gawd, so intense. And what nice wrists you have. So thick and naughty. Well. What do you want to talk about, brown eyes? Would you like to hear about my rise to stardom? I was an overnight success, you might say, in the iiteral sense."
"! want to talk about Admiral Thornton Ives, the Secretary of the Navy. Did you know him?"
Bobby Jay giggled. "Not in the Biblical sense."
Remo collared him. "If you don't start giving me some straight answers, I'm going to punch you out. In the unconscious sense."
"I love it when you play rough."
Remo counted to ten. "Okay. Let's start over. What was your relationship with Admiral Ives?"
"Ugh, please. That old man? I'd never have a relationship with a sixty-year-old sailor. What do you think ! am, a tart? I'd rather drown in a sea of elephant piss. Say, I never thought about that before. Sounds kind of kinky-elephant piss. What do you think?"
"I think you'd have a swell time. Were you friends with the admiral?"
"God, no. He wasn't part of the group."
"What group?"
Bobby Jay smiled lewdly and sidled closer to Remo. "Why, the in group, of course. The jet-setters. The beau monde. The BPs. All the people who matter."
"Like who?"
"Oh, everyone. Mrs. Spangler and the senator, they're part of the group. And Posie Ponselle, the actress-"
"Posie Ponselie? I thought she was dead."
"Oh, stars, no. Posse's still lovely. For a woman. Although she must be a hundred years old by now," he added maliciously. "But that's Shangri-la for you.
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Oops, I suppose 1 shouldn't have said that, it's so hard to keep a secret from the man of your dreams."
"Shangri-la?"
"Yeah. You know, 'Your kisses take me ..." "
"I know the tune, thanks," Remo said.
Bobby Jay stroked his arm. "It's a health clinic."
"In Pennsylvania?"
"Yes. Have you been there?"
"No," Remo said. "That's where Mrs. Spangler was going when I talked to her. What about it?"
"Now, I really can't say any more. They'll ail just be boiling if they find out I've told an outsider about us. You do understand, don't you? If everybody knew about Shangri-la, all the fat paupers in the world would be storming the place."
"Sure," Remo said. "Wouldn't want to get a bad element in there with the likes of you and the other BMs."
"BPs," Bobby corrected. "That stands for Beautiful People." He pressed close to Remo.
"Think you'd qualify as a Beautiful Person with two black eyes and a broken nose?"
Bobby Jay moved away, sniffing scornfully. "Philistine. And I was going to ask you if you
wanted to join. Not that you could anyway. I can tell you're not rich enough. Your T-shirt doesn't even have anybody's name on it."
Remo pulled out the guest list Cecilia Spangler had given him. Posie Ponselle's name was one of the people Remo had tried to reach. She was out of town. "Will you look at these names?" he asked Bobby Jay, indicating the first section of his list. Bobby did, and handed it back.
"Yes?"
"You said that the senator and Mrs. Spangler were
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on their way to this Shangri-la place. Apparently, Posie Ponselle made the same trip, and you're going there, too. Are any of the other names on this list members of your club?"
"But of course, gorgeous. Most of them."
"Where is this place?"
"Ah, ah. I told you, I can't reveal any more. Unless you're thinking of joining."
"Then Set's say ! am."
Bobby Jay chuckled, "it's not so easy. The application fee is three thousand dollars, and you have to make at least a half-million a year."
"A half-million? How'd you get in?"
"My roommate's a tax lawyer," Bobby said.
"Pretty fancy club. What goes on at the meetings?"
"That I can't tell you. We've all been sworn to secrecy."
"I wish you would," Remo said, twisting Bobby Jay's ear until the singer's face contorted in pain.
"Oh. Oh," he moaned. "More. Oh, it hurts so good."
Remo stopped. It was no use. He was probably on the wrong track, anyway. Admiral Ives hadn't even been a member of the queen's in group of BPs. He was back to square one.
"Forget it," he said.
"Never," Bobby Jay sighed. "You were wonderful. I've never been pinched like that before. How are you at biting?"
"Let's get back to the admiral," Remo said disgustedly.
"Why are you so interested in him?" Bobby pouted. "He's a nobody."
"He's dead."
"See? He's so much of a nobody that I never even
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heard he died. Did Rona Barrett cover it? Did he make 'Entertainment Tonight'?"
"Do you know anyone who was friends with him?"
"Certainly not. I don't associate with nobodies."
"Who'd he talk to at the party?"
"Who cares? Other nobodies. Oh, yes." He smiled up at Remo. "I know who you can talk to. Seymour Burdich."
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