People Like Us

by Dominick Dunne

  “My client is virtually penniless,” Henry Caldwell had announced to the press over and over in the weeks preceding the sentencing, scoffing at reports that Elias had stashed hundreds of millions of dollars in Swiss bank accounts. Elias stood beside him, with a mournful expression on his face, but everyone knew that Elias Renthal was nowhere near penniless.

  For propriety’s sake, Elias, his lawyers, and his bodyguards squeezed into a Japanese compact car rather than his usual limousine to arrive at the courthouse on the day of his sentencing, in the hopes of conveying the impression to the reporters and photographers that his circumstances were reduced. They drove downtown in silence, interrupted only by Elias, who shifted his position uncomfortably in the crowded backseat, saying to no one in particular, “I’ve been in roomier women.”

  On that morning the newspapers were filled with remarks by business leaders on the about-to-be-sentenced financier. Sims Lord, who had personal reasons for loathing Elias Renthal, said in the Times, “It is impossible for me to admire people who rape the system and then get nothing but a slap on the wrist because they have entrapped their fellow partners in crime. I hope the judge throws the book at him.”

  Elias looked neither left nor right as he walked up the steps to the courthouse, flanked by his lawyers and bodyguards, ignoring the press as they yelled questions at him.

  In the courtroom, there was not an empty seat. The sentencing of Elias Renthal was a media event, with press from around the world there to witness the great financier’s downfall.

  “Please rise,” said the court clerk, as Judge Maurice McAuliff entered the courtroom.

  Henry Caldwell pleaded that his client deserved leniency because he had exposed wrongdoing in ten major brokerage houses and had already paid a fine of $150 million. “A sentence in this type of case should not involve excessive incarceration,” he said.

  “It is unthinkable,” argued the prosecutor, “that white-collar criminals can walk away by simply paying back what they have stolen in the first place.”

  Judge McAuliff, who was known to be lenient, listened to the arguments of both sides. “Your crimes, Mr. Renthal, are too serious to forgive and forget. It would be a terrible precedent for me to set in this court. The message must go out loud and clear that breaking the law is breaking the law,” he said before passing sentence. “Criminal behavior such as yours cannot go unchecked.”

  Elias did not flinch when the judge sentenced him to five years in Allenwood, which meant, everyone knew, that, with good behavior, he would in all probability be released in two-and-a-half years. The judge was thought to have taken into consideration the work that Elias had done at a soup kitchen for the homeless at St. Bart’s church during the time between his arrest and his sentencing.

  If Byron Macumber had not committed suicide, and left two young daughters, Kimberly and Sharon, Ruby might have been able to forgive Elias, but even after she had made an arrangement through her lawyers that would guarantee the education of the little girls from her own money, the suicide haunted her.

  On the night before Elias was to check into Allenwood, Elias and Ruby dined alone, except for Max Luby, in their magnificent dining room, beneath ancestral portraits, on exquisite plates, and drank vintage wines from glasses embossed with R’s by a now dead Rothschild a hundred years before. Each was glad to have Max there because they no longer knew what to say to each other. Later, leaving, Max, good old Max, as he had become known to Ruby and Elias, embraced Elias, and the two old friends from Cleveland looked into each other’s tear-filled eyes as they nodded farewell.

  Later still, walking by Ruby’s bedroom, on his way to the bedroom that had become his since they returned from Europe, Elias tapped with the tips of his fingers on Ruby’s door, not for an invitation to enter, which he no longer expected, but as a way of saying good-night for the last time.

  “Come in,” came Ruby’s voice from inside, to Elias’s surprise.

  “Really?” he said, entering.

  “Really,” Ruby answered, smiling, patting the side of the bed next to her for him to get in. Whatever had happened, Ruby knew that Elias Renthal had taken her out of one life and made another possible for her, and for that she was grateful.

  They spent the night together, as if they were the young stewardess and the middle-aged millionaire they had been when they first met and had dreams, all of which had been realized.

  “I’m not going to keep the apartment, Elias,” Ruby said, in the back of their limousine as they drove to the prison in Pennsylvania for him to begin his term.

  “Why not? There’s still plenty of money,” Elias answered. Even on his way to prison for illegal use of money, he still thought of everything in terms of money.

  Ruby shook her head. “Too big,” she said.

  “The Rhinelander?” he asked. “Why don’t you move to the Rhinelander, like Loelia did? That might be nice for you until you find a new apartment.”

  “I thought I’d leave the city for a while,” she said.

  “Leave the city?”

  “I’m going to move to Merry Hill. Or, should I say, Not-So-Merry Hill.”

  “You’ll miss your friends out there.”

  “No, I won’t.” She hadn’t seen any of her friends since she returned from Europe.

  When the limousine arrived at the gates of the prison, a swarm of television cameras and newspeople were gathered. Ruby touched Elias’s face. “I’m not going to get out, Elias,” she said, pulling back into her corner.

  “No, of course not,” he answered.

  “I’ll send books, and magazines, and things, and call and write.”

  “I’m sorry, Ruby,” he said. “I don’t know the right words to tell you how sorry I am that I put you through all this.”

  “I know, Elias,” she answered.

  “You know I love you, don’t you?”

  “Yes, I know,” she said.

  “You didn’t hate being married to me, did you?”

  “Only when you peed in my bidet,” she replied.

  They both laughed. “I’m going to miss you, Ruby,” he said.

  For a few moments they looked at each other.

  “Kiss?” he asked.

  “Sure,” she replied. He leaned over and took her in his arms and kissed her warmly.

  “Remember the good parts,” he said.

  “I’m trying,” she answered.

  “Bye.”

  “Bye.”

  Elias knocked on the window of the limousine, and the chauffeur opened the door. Immediately the buzz of the media could be heard as they swarmed around the door of the car.

  “Listen, Elias,” said Ruby.

  “What?”

  “You were swell to me. I’ll never forget that.”

  44

  Lil Altemus, ever perplexing, cried unconsolably for Bobo, her hairdresser Bobo, when he died, in a way that she had never been able to cry for her son Hubie. Justine felt, as did Dodo and Janet and Matilda, that the tears she shed for Bobo were the tears she had not shed for Hubie. “So young,” she kept saying. “So young,” although Bobo was ten years older than Hubie had been.

  It was when Bobo, whom Lil always claimed to have “discovered,” was dying, in the same hospital where Hubie had died, that Justine, visiting him with armloads of his favorite rubrum lilies, the kind he had once used to adorn Justine’s hair, decided to take hold of her life and do something useful so that she would not end up like her mother, serving on committees. “The Van Degan women have always had a sense of their responsibility to the city,” Lil would say over and over to Justine, but Justine had other ideas about her responsibility than serving on her mother’s committees.

  After a gilded party chair collapsed under her weight during one of Maisie Verdurin’s parties, Babette Bulbenkian, the immensely heavy wife of the billionaire Reza Bulbenkian, agreed to spend several months at a fat farm in Arizona. It was Yvonne Lupescu who had suggested the fat farm, which she called a diet farm, to Bab
ette, telling her stories of wondrous weight reductions of friends who had gone there.

  Returned, reduced, Babette pirouetted gracefully for her husband of thirty years, with the dainty mannerisms of a petite woman, to show off her weight loss of nine pounds and six ounces, a weight loss so insufficient to the amount she needed to lose that it was discernible only to someone as familiar with her body for as long a time as her husband was.

  “Ah, yes, bravo, Babette,” Reza said, clapping wearily for what Babette considered to be her triumph, and dreading the moments ahead of him. Reza had fallen hopelessly in love with Yvonne Lupescu, who had first caught his attention by complimenting him on the excellence of his toupee at another of Maisie’s dinners, and, during his wife’s absence at her fat farm, Reza had proposed marriage to her.

  In prison, Elias Renthal had disturbing dreams that caused him to awaken covered with sweat, but he could never remember what it was he had dreamed. He missed the silk pajamas and linen sheets that the maids at his apartment in town and his house in the country had changed daily for him. He complained about the rough and scratchy toilet paper and wrote Ruby to send him a carton of the two-ply variety she ordered in England.

  At first he was assigned to the laundry detail and later, after some string pulling, to the library, although he knew very little about books, other than books about finance and investments. He exercised every day and began to lose weight. On the advice of his lawyers, he attended church services on Sundays and agreed to be interviewed in prison by Gus Bailey, whom he called Gus, not Bus, wanting to be pictured in as favorable light as possible, as if the prison experience had transformed him and the greed that had enveloped his insides had evaporated. He talked to Gus of wanting to help other people when he got out, specifically the homeless of the city of New York.

  He learned to play bridge, writing to Ruby that he was becoming a regular Ezzie Fenwick of the bridge table, and had a foursome with a former congressman, in for accepting bribes, a former head of a rock-and-roll record company, in for dealing cocaine, and the former head of a cement firm, in for illegal payoffs. He continued to read all the financial papers and magazines. Barred forever from trading on the stock exchange, he took to making imaginary investments. He found that even without insider information, he could have made himself a very rich man.

  In the days of his business triumphs, Elias had disdained reading social columns as too frivolous or too time-wasting, but in prison he regularly read the columns of Dolly De Longpre, Florian Gray, and Mavis Jones and became consumed with curiosity about the social life of people he had once known. “We would have been there,” he thought to himself, or told his bridge group, reading about Ezzie Fenwick’s birthday party at Clarence’s, or Adele Harcourt’s small dinner for the First Lady, or Lil Altemus’s reception at her Fifth Avenue apartment for Placido Domingo after his concert at the Metropolitan Opera House. Elias was envious of their freedom to come and go, and saddened to realize that, even after he had atoned for his sins of greed, those people who had once been his friends lived in a world that would never be available to him again.

  45

  After Gus returned to California, he took to stopping in at Peach’s house in the afternoons and sitting on the end of her bed. Sometimes she thought he wanted to tell her something, but he never engaged in anything more than desultory conversation.

  One afternoon Gus thumbed through a magazine, casually reading an article he had written on Elias Renthal in prison, while Peach continued to look at her television set.

  “Did you read this article I wrote about Elias Renthal in prison?” he asked.

  “Not yet. I will,” she answered.

  Gus sometimes wondered if Peach ever read the articles he wrote. “As prisons go, that’s the way to be in prison,” he said. “I saw guys jogging with Walkmans in their ears. No high walls, or barbed wire. There’s a painted white line, and the prisoners can’t go beyond that, and none of them do, because if they do, they’re shipped right out to a real prison, where the tough guys are, and there’s no more jogging with Walkmans in their ears.”

  Peach nodded and went on looking at television.

  “Did I tell you I put the apartment in New York up for sale?” he asked.

  “I thought you liked that apartment,” she said. “Doesn’t it have a terrace? I think someone told me that.”

  “I did like it, but I wanted to get my things in order.”

  “Good heavens. You’re not thinking of committing suicide, or anything, are you?”

  “No.”

  “We’ve had enough to deal with in this family, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “Why did you come back to California, Gus?” asked Peach, turning off the television set.

  Gus shrugged. “Why not?”

  “I don’t call that an answer, when I’ve asked you a question.” They still talked like married people.

  “I just decided that it was time to come back. I was gone for three years. I mean, this was home, wasn’t it?”

  “I thought you enjoyed New York. All those peculiar people you write about, like Elias Renthal and Jorgie Sanchez-Julia, and that ghastly dictator’s ghastly mistress. I thought you liked all that.”

  “It was okay,” Gus replied, not looking up from his magazine.

  Peach looked at Gus. She was beginning not to understand her former husband, whom she had always understood so well.

  Anthony Feliciano told Gus that Lefty Flint was being released from the Men’s Correctional Institute in Vacaville, California, on the thirteenth of the month. His sister Agnes Flint and his fiancée Marguerite Hanrahan were planning to drive to Vacaville and bring him back to Los Angeles. He was going to work as a bartender in Marguerite’s bar in Studio City.

  “What was his record in Vacaville?” asked Gus.

  “A model of decorum. Read his Bible every day. The warden’s favorite,” said Feliciano.

  “Where’s he going to be living?” asked Gus.

  “In West Hollywood. On Reeves—1342¼ South Reeves. You can’t see it from the street. It’s a little apartment over the garage behind an apartment complex.”

  Gus took out his wallet and removed a blank check.

  “I want to pay up,” he said.

  “I’ll send you a bill at the end of the month, like always,” said Feliciano.

  “No, I want to settle,” said Gus.

  “You’re not firing me, are you?”

  “No, it’s just the end of the line.”

  “This is the time to keep an eye on him, now that he’s getting out.”

  “I’d like to settle up,” repeated Gus.

  “I thought you wanted his hands crushed in a vise.”

  Gus laughed. “That was only a figure of speech.”

  “Shit,” said Feliciano.

  “What?”

  “I’d lined up a great guy for you.”

  “What kind of great guy? A hand crusher?”

  “Something like that.”

  “No, no, thanks,” said Gus. “That sort of thing is not up my alley.” He moved toward the door. “Thanks very much for all your help.”

  “Listen, Gus,” said Feliciano, stopping his exit.

  Gus turned back to look at him.

  “You don’t mind my calling you Gus, do you?”

  “Of course not.”

  “I read your article on Elias Renthal in prison.”

  Gus nodded.

  “In case you’re thinking of taking care of Lefty Flint yourself, the kind of place they’ll send you to is nothing like the country-club prison that crook Renthal is in.”

  Gus looked at Anthony Feliciano for a moment, as if he was about to say something. Then he turned and left without saying anything.

  At a red light on Sunset Boulevard, near the Beverly Hills Hotel, Gus looked into the light brown BMW in the next lane and saw Marv Pink behind the wheel. Marv Pink had been the defense lawyer who had managed to convince the jury that Lefty Flint had
not committed murder, merely manslaughter, when he put his hands around Becky Bailey’s neck for five minutes and strangled the life out of her. Marv Pink had on the same brown gabardine suit and brown tie with a single cream-colored stripe across the middle that he had worn during most of the trial. The feeling of revulsion that Gus always felt whenever anything to do with Lefty Flint intruded on his life came over him, but he continued to stare rather than look away, as if he were looking at a car wreck.

  Aware suddenly that he was being stared at, Marv Pink turned and looked at Gus, whom he had not seen since Lefty Flint’s sentencing three years earlier. The two men stared at each other from car to car. Marv Pink raised his hand in a gesture of greeting, and his iridescent cat’s-eye pinky ring flashed in the California sunlight.

  Gus Bailey did not give any indication of recognition.

  46

  Within hours after Ruby Renthal put the vast apartment where she no longer wished to live on the market, the billionaire Reza Bulbenkian offered her twenty million dollars for it as a gift for his bride. Helene Whitbeck, the real-estate broker, said she had never had such an immediate reaction to an apartment in all her years in the business and thought that the famous ball of the Renthals had added to the cachet of the apartment.

  After Bulbenkian divorced Babette, his wife of thirty years, at the same island resort where Bernie Slatkin had gotten his twenty-four-hour divorce, he immediately married Yvonne Lupescu, thirty years his junior, at a hastily improvised candlelit ceremony in the Lady Chapel of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, which had been swathed in purple orchids and gardenias, Yvonne’s favorite flowers, by Lorenza, for the occasion. Although the Cardinal did not officiate, because of all the divorces, he was present at the ceremony and at the small but lavish reception that followed at the Rhinelander Hotel.

  Yvonne had hurried on the marital commitment, while Babette Bulbenkian was losing her nine pounds and six ounces at her fat farm in Arizona, following a confrontation scene between Reza and Constantine de Rham, who had burst in on the lovers in conjugal union in Constantine’s house on Sutton Place.