The First Wife

by Diana Diamond

  She sighed in frustration. “Art, I’m not going to ask William Andrews to back one of your plays. At least not until after our tenth anniversary.”

  “Maybe you could just introduce us?”

  Jane stood, picked up the paper coffee cups, and carried them to the trash can. Art rose and stretched lazily.

  “Don’t get comfortable,” she cautioned. “I’m going to soak in a hot tub and then try to get a few hours of sleep. I’d like to be alone.”

  She followed her plan to the letter. As soon as her former husband left, Jane bolted the door and started her bath. She was hunched down in chin-deep water when she remembered the news articles still lying next to the computer. She remembered Andrews standing only inches away from them and realizing that he must have seen them. The thought made her sit up straight.

  He had to have known that it was her research, and it must have been obvious that she was digging into the unsolved murder of his first wife. So why hadn’t he mentioned it? He could easily have asked why she was interested. Or he could have told her that she was delving into painful memories and asked her to stop. Maybe he simply didn’t want to ruin the evening he was planning by having his past intrude on his future. Or perhaps he couldn’t admit that he had been glancing through her papers. But whatever the reason, the subject was certain to come up sometime. She climbed out of the tub, put on her bathrobe, and left wet footprints as she went to her computer to put all her research out of sight. When she picked up the papers, she knew immediately that someone had been going through them.

  Jane remembered glancing at her desk to see what Andrews could have seen when he stood at her computer. She could clearly visualize the page that had been lying on top. Now another page with photos of Kay and William was at the top of the stack. The page she remembered was near the middle.

  She tried to change her recollection. This had to be the printout that she saw. When she and Andrews left the apartment, she heard the click of the lock behind her. And this morning she had needed her key to get in. Things had to be exactly as she had left them. But they weren’t. Jane was sure of what she had seen. Someone had been in the apartment, going through her papers. Who? Probably not Art, who had been waiting outside. And why? What stories was she working on that would cause someone to break in for a look at her notes?

  It has to be about the Kay Parker murder, she decided. Nothing in her business coverage would warrant breaking and entering. She sat in her bathrobe and re-read everything she had found from the first two days after the murder.

  When she was finished she pulled up to the keyboard and connected to the electronic morgues of the New York papers for the following few days. The story was no longer front page in the tabloids, which had found new tragedies to exploit. But it was still up-front news with a picture of the hearse that had been sent by a prominent New York funeral home to bring Kay Parker back to the city. Search teams, now managed by the state police, were still combing the rugged terrain for clues to the intruder. A lieutenant was quoted to the effect that the snowfall had buried any tracks that the man might have made and had kept neighbors in their homes, so there were no witnesses.

  Robert Leavitt, again acting as the family spokesman, said that Andrews would accompany his wife’s body back to New York. Andrews was seeking a waiver of the usual autopsy of murder victims. “The cause of death is brutally obvious,” Leavitt was quoted, “and the family would like to spare Kay’s body any further violence.” The coroner must have agreed because no autopsy was performed.

  There seemed to be universal agreement that the motive for the crime was burglary. Several ski houses in the area had been broken into over the past few seasons during weekdays, when they were vacant. The speculation was that Kay had caught the intruder in the act and screamed for her husband. When Andrews rushed to the scene, the man had panicked and fired. But the same lieutenant said that police had not yet established how the man had gotten in.

  The Times went a bit further, reporting that there was no evidence of a break-in. It added an interview with the police sergeant, who had turned his investigation over to the troopers. He raised questions about the intruder’s escape, pointing out that there was only one road from the town to the area where the Andrewses’ chalet was located. “If he had called me first,” he said, reminding the reporter that Andrews’s first call had been to Robert Leavitt, “I might’ve run into the guy coming down the road.” Then he added another slap on the wrist for Andrews. “Heck, chances are his friend passed the killer on his way up to the house.”

  Jane dug into the next few days and found the story back on the front page. There were photos of mourners leaving the funeral parlor after Kay’s cremation. The focus was on the loss of an important contributor to New York society, with quotations from the mayor’s eulogy. Kay Parker, he promised, was looking down on her beloved city, and her guiding hand would shape New York cultural life for generations to come.

  There was also a short interview with the city’s chief medical examiner criticizing the omission of an autopsy and the rush to cremation. “You can’t know what an autopsy might reveal until you conduct one,” he said impatiently. “If the crime had occurred in my jurisdiction, there would have been an autopsy.”

  She stayed at her computer for the rest of the morning, unable to satisfy her curiosity about the death of William’s first wife. Only when she was overtaken by exhaustion did she finally stretch out on her bed, but even then the newspaper stories churned in her mind. She understood why William had phoned Leavitt first. Leavitt was his constant companion and right hand in business. He was there in the mountains precisely to respond immediately to any of William’s needs. But why wasn’t he staying at the house? If he was there to be on hand, why was he half an hour away in a commercial inn?

  Why avoid an autopsy? It was standard in homicide cases even when the cause of death was as obvious as a knife sticking out of the victim’s back or a bullet hole through the forehead. The explanation of saving his wife’s body further damage didn’t ring true for someone as thorough as Andrews. So what was he trying to hide? Was Kay a drug user? Had she been high or drunk when she was killed? Did she have a disease that might be threatening to her children? Jane tossed and turned for half an hour before she finally dropped off to sleep.

  The telephone awakened her. She felt around the night table, pushed the button on her alarm clock, and then knocked the handset onto the floor. She was on all fours when she finally got the phone to her ear.

  “Am I interrupting something?” William Andrews asked.

  “I was asleep. I had a very busy night.” She gave a delicious yawn.

  He laughed heartily. “I almost fell asleep at my Chicago meeting,” he admitted.

  Jane leaned her back against the side of her bed. She liked talking to him, she was beginning to discover.

  Andrews moved through his topics as if he were checking them off with a pencil. First was their living arrangements. He wanted her to move into his apartment. She should come over in the next few days when he would be away in Washington at an FCC hearing. “Stay there and go through the place. Anything you don’t like we’ll get rid of. And if you want to move in any of your things, that’s fine. I’m going to tell Eileen to expect a call from you and to make sure you’re comfortable.”

  “Who’s Eileen?” she demanded suspiciously.

  “Eileen? Eileen McCarty!”

  “Okay. Now, who’s Eileen McCarty?”

  “My housekeeper. She keeps the cupboard stocked and the dust on the run.”

  “And does she wear a French maid’s costume?”

  Again he laughed heartily. “That would be a sight you wouldn’t want to see. Eileen is old enough to be your mother and probably just as proper. I call her my housekeeper, but she really manages the place. Makes sure I always have food and water.”

  “She lives in?”

  “No, she lives on the West Side. But she gets there early and leaves late.”

 
“I hate her already.”

  Another laugh. “Don’t. At least not until you meet her. And if you don’t like her, we can pension her off and get someone else.”

  His next subject was the wedding. He thought they could get married at the federal court building by one of the judges. “Just us and the kids,” he suggested. “And we can have a reception for a few close friends at the apartment. We’ll keep it small and private. The quicker we go through with it, the less chance we’ll be raided by the press.”

  “Sounds good,” she said, realizing that he was already managing the details of her life.

  “Now, your job,” he went on. “I know how much you like it, but I don’t think you’ll want to become a reverse commuter. I think you should give notice right away.”

  She took a deep breath. “Let’s talk about that, Bill. The people at the paper are all my friends….”

  “Sure. Whatever you want. But I was hoping you’d be with me on some of my trips, and I’d hate to have you sacked for absenteeism.”

  He moved immediately to his next concern. He hoped to bring his children home from their boarding schools and move them into the Manhattan apartment. “Not right away,” he assured her, “but in time for the fall school openings. So perhaps you could keep that in mind when you’re going through the place.”

  Jane had instant recall of her fall from the horse and of overhearing Bill’s suspicion that one of his children put the burr under her saddle. She could imagine Craig pushing her off the penthouse balcony.

  “Now, here’s my schedule,” Andrews continued, rattling off a list of the countries he would be in for the next two weeks. Then he gave his final instructions. He could always be reached through his secretary, Ann Packard, who really ran his office. Ann could always get in touch with Robert Leavitt, and Leavitt always knew where to find Andrews.

  “I guess that’s about it,” he concluded.

  “No, it isn’t,” Jane snapped.

  “It isn’t? What have I missed?”

  “Telling me that you love me. That I’m the most important part of your life.”

  He stammered for an instant. “Oh God, I didn’t say that, did I?”

  “If you did, I must have missed it.”

  “Jane, please bear with me. I haven’t loved anyone in so long that I’ve probably forgotten how.”

  “I love you, Bill,” she told him.

  “And I love you. I really do.”

  She held the phone dangling from her fingertips for a full minute after he hung up. It had been one of the least romantic conversations she had ever had with a man, and only a few hours after they had been rolling in bed together. He had shown no recollection of their physical love. It was as if he had pulled into a gas station, filled up, and was now back in the fast lane. Was he marrying her or simply adding her to his busy schedule? Art had assumed that her life would become an appendage to his own, which never made sense because Art had no life of his own. But it made perfect sense that a tycoon like William Andrews would never break stride to meet a wife’s needs. Could she really expect him to sit still, truly listen to her, and honestly try to understand her?

  The telephone began screeching its off-the-hook alarm, jarring her out of her melancholy moment. Let’s see what happens next, she thought. I’m not married yet. She would take at least the next step and introduce herself to the other two women in William’s life, his housekeeper and his secretary.

  She didn’t wear her ring into the office the next day, nor did she mention to anyone that she was engaged. Jack Dollinger was very solicitous of her health and of the illness that had kept her at home. “Check with your doctor,” he advised. “There’s a lot of pneumonia going around.” Roscoe Taylor was more suspicious. “What did you have, a hangover?” As always, he seemed to know more than he was letting on. He asked about her research into Kay Parker’s violent death. She denied that it was research. “Just morbid curiosity. It seems to have been a terrible tragedy.”

  “A mystery,” he corrected. “Who did in the fabulous Kay Parker? And why?”

  “You don’t believe it was an intruder?”

  He shrugged. “If it was, it had to be one of the neighbors. Someone who could have made his escape without going back down the road and through the village. And all the neighbors checked out. No motives and great alibis.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “You’ve been digging into this, haven’t you?”

  Roscoe smiled. “Not digging! I just happened to be talking to an old friend who did a lot of work on the story. He remembers rumors that there was another woman in William Andrews’s life. A traveling companion. But nothing that could be proved. And he remembers a lot of political pressure to get the whole affair over with quickly and quietly. The publisher told his editor that he would be held personally responsible for anything printed, and the editor moved my friend onto another assignment.”

  Jane felt herself bristling. “What are you saying, Roscoe? That there was a cover-up that included the press?”

  “No! You know me better than that. What I’m telling you is that Kay Parker’s death was certainly a tragedy, but it remains a mystery. It pops up from time to time in true-crime tabloids, and the suggestions are not always flattering to Andrews. So if you’re getting involved with the guy, you can expect to be spattered in occasional rounds of mudslinging.”

  She sat back. “I am involved, Roscoe. He asked me to marry him.”

  Taylor smiled. “My best wishes. Once again William Andrews has demonstrated an uncanny eye for value.”

  “Do you think I’m getting in over my head?” Jane asked sincerely.

  “Not in the least. You can play in any game that he does. Personally, I think he’s unworthy of you. But you are stepping out into the limelight. It will be a very different life for you.”

  17

  Eileen McCarty turned out to be a smallish woman, probably in her fifties, with a hint of an Irish brogue. She was welcoming and pleasant but decidedly nervous to be meeting with a new “woman of the house.”

  She had been waiting in the foyer, dressed in a tasteful pantsuit, when Jane stepped off the private elevator that had carried her up twenty-five floors to the penthouse. She offered her hand and announced, “I have coffee in the breakfast room.”

  Even at a quick glance, Andrews’s penthouse was unbelievable. There were two archways from the foyer, and the one they entered opened to the central rooms. First was a reception area with a leather sofa, armchairs, and a coffee table. The walls were done in panels of brocade beneath crown moldings. There was an Oriental carpet on the floor. The area was as big as her living room, Jane noticed, and this was just an appetizer to the rooms behind. Next came a formal dining room with a long table and seating for sixteen. There were sideboards and serving carts and a glass breakfront that displayed a department store window’s worth of china and crystal. Two chandeliers with Tiffany glass lamps hung from the ceiling. The door to one side, she would later learn, connected to the kitchen. The door on the other side led to the climate-controlled wine cellar.

  She was dazzled the instant she stepped into the living room. It was two stories high. The far wall was a single sheet of glass looking out over a patio railing at the expanse of Central Park. To one side was a piano, set up as a cocktail bar amid a gathering of soft chairs. Ahead, commanding the view of the park, was a grouping of light, elegant Danish pieces. A long sofa, a trio of straight yet soft conversational chairs, and a giant coffee table. She guessed that a dozen people could gather around the table without feeling in the least bit crowded. To the left were two other sofas facing each other over a glass table, with complementary side chairs. The room could handle a hundred people with a third of them sitting. What she realized when she was well into the space was that there had not been any attempt at an overall decorating scheme. The room simply provided the space in which each of the various furniture groupings was free to make its own statement.

  Above, to either side, were balconies t
hat Jane guessed connected the bedrooms. On the left wing she caught a glimpse of ceiling-high bookshelves in what she assumed was a library.

  Eileen McCarty led her to the far left edge of the room, where a breakfast area reached in just far enough to share the glass facade. It was served by another door leading to the kitchen. They sat in leather-strapped dining chairs at a marble-top table. A silver coffee urn, cups, saucers, plates, and silverware were waiting. Eileen poured two cups and uncovered a plate of miniature Danish.

  “My God,” Jane observed breathlessly, “my whole apartment would fit in the living room.”

  “With room left over for mine,” the housekeeper said. “And the crime of it is that it goes empty most of the time. I understand that Mrs. Andrews did a great deal of entertaining, with often more than a hundred people. But that was before I was here. Now there’s hardly ever more than two in any room at any time.”

  She had been hired six years ago, she said, after the penthouse had gone unused for a while. “Mr. Andrews couldn’t stand to come back to the place. He had everything redecorated before he opened it up again. Except their room. That’s the way she left it.”

  Eileen knew nothing about Kay Parker except what she had read about the fabulous socialite in the papers. Like everyone else, she had been heartbroken by the girl’s terrible death. But she didn’t know anyone in the family and had never worked for them. She had just answered an ad in the paper for a household manager.

  “I had no idea who it was. Even when I was given the name Andrews, I never put it together with Kay Parker. And it wasn’t Mr. Andrews who interviewed me but rather Mr. Leavitt. When I heard who it was, I thought, Well, you’ll never get this job, Eileen. You could have knocked me over with a feather when they called me back.”

  It took her a while to figure out why they had picked her, Mrs. McCarty said as she poured more coffee. “Then I realized that they didn’t want anyone around who could understand all the grand things that Mr. Andrews and the other gentlemen talk about. It’s hardly likely I could compromise something that I couldn’t make sense of.”