Jane’s imagination went wild. A blackmailer, she decided. Selina Royce knew William Andrews’s darkest secret, and she was charging him a hundred thousand a month to keep quiet—$1.2 million a year! It must be quite a secret. She thought about the timing. The first check had gone out just a few months after Kay Parker’s untimely death. So if it was blackmail, it stood to reason that it had something to do with the murder.
But why would Bill be paying off someone in connection with the murder? Unless he was involved in some way. It was unthinkable, but suppose he had killed his first wife, as some of the reporters at the time seemed to suspect. Could Selina Royce, whoever she was, have known? Was that why he was sending her monthly checks?
Jane went back to the address book and looked under “R.” And there was the entry, Selina Royce, 24 Boulevard Haussmann, Paris. Her husband-to-be was sending over a million dollars a year to a woman who lived in the fashionable center of Paris.
She slammed the books closed and stuffed them back into the desk. She sat silently, trying to take in the information she had just uncovered. Blackmail? If that’s what it was, then Bill was probably involved somehow in his wife’s death. But maybe it wasn’t blackmail. Andrews was a young, virile man living without the wife he adored. Certainly he would be interested in women, and just as certainly he could easily afford to keep a mistress. That could be the answer, and it was easier to imagine than her fiancé’s being a murderer.
But even then the information was unsettling. Probably Selina Royce was the reason for William’s frequent trips to Paris. She remembered that at their first meeting, when he had introduced himself to her and taken her on a tour of the city, he had broken away for the afternoon in order to attend to a business affair. Could that have been a liaison with his mistress?
Jane was suddenly frightened to the point that her hands were shaking. She had spent the day trying to make arrangements for her wedding to a man she was growing to love. A man who, at worst, may have killed his first wife and, at best, was keeping a mistress whom he had continued to finance even while he was proposing to her. A man who was resented, maybe even hated, by his children and who had created a safe space by surrounding himself with a staff of loyal sycophants. My God, what did she really know about William Andrews? She knew about his public life, which was undoubtedly the creation of his PR department. She was well aware of his financial assets. She had met his children, who were spoiled, and a few of his employees and underlings, who clearly resented her intrusion.
There were a few other things she knew. When called out of his world of endless competition, he could be soft, sympathetic, and caring. He was a considerate and romantic lover. In some way that she didn’t fully understand, he seemed to need her. But who or what was he? What secrets would unravel as they spent more time together? What role would she play in his life?
She would go on with the wedding arrangements. She had agreed to marry the man, and he seemed aware of the problems she faced in competing with the memory of Kay Parker. But she would leave no stone unturned to find the answers to the questions he posed. In particular, she would find out exactly who Selina Royce was and what hold she had on Bill that made her worth more than a million a year.
Jane got back to business. She started with the caterers listed in the phone book, looking for the ones with high-rent addresses. Then she introduced herself to each one by saying, “I’m calling for William Andrews, the late Kay Parker’s husband.” Some of the caterers didn’t make the connection. But there were two who nearly jumped through the phone at the mention of Kay’s name. A bit of grilling showed which of the two had handled most of Kay’s parties and remembered the details. That was the one she invited for an interview.
She also browsed the shops of interior decorators, looking for hints of masculine taste and democratic restraint. She found one she liked, and the man who owned the business seemed to understand her problem in dealing with Kay’s carefully preserved bedroom. “Best to bite the bullet,” he said. “Half measures never please anyone.” Jane invited him up to see the apartment. Then she caught a train out of Grand Central and headed back to Southport to see what Roscoe knew about a woman named Selina Royce.
He shook his head at the mention of the name. “No one I can remember,” he said. “But I’ll ask. There are still a few of us around who reported on the fantasy life of Kay Parker.” He scribbled a reminder on his desk pad and then asked without looking up, “Is everything going well? Are you okay?”
Jane settled into a chair. “I’m an outsider,” she announced. “I’m going where I’m not wanted.”
“The groom’s ardor is cooling?”
“That might be impossible. The groom is already frozen.”
Roscoe folded his hands behind his head and tipped back his chair. “Maybe you’re moving too quickly? You might take a little more time to get to know each other.”
“Roscoe, he’s surrounded by gatekeepers who won’t let anyone get through. They portion out his time in thirty-second increments. They cover up his past as if he had an earlier career as the Boston Strangler. Bill lets them get away with it. He tells me to be patient, that they’ll come around.”
Jane stood and eased the office door closed. Then she took her boss through her research into Kay Parker’s death—the doubts about the existence of an intruder, the time delay in summoning the police, the previous night’s business meeting at the inn that seemed never to have taken place. “The investigation was a travesty,” she concluded.
“Powerful people don’t like ordinary folks looking into their affairs,” Roscoe said, not at all surprised that Jane’s investigation had confirmed his own suspicions.
Jane moved to the edge of his desk, nearly in his lap, when she whispered her findings about Selina Royce. “William Andrews has been sending a hundred thousand a month to a woman named Selina Royce in Paris.”
That news widened Roscoe Taylor’s eyes. Everything Jane had been telling him was old news. Her sense of alarm could easily be written off as paranoia coupled with prewedding jitters. But a hundred thousand a month from his private account smelled of blackmail. And the existence of blackmail indicated a secret that William Andrews didn’t want revealed, no matter what the cost. “How hard do you want me to press on this stuff?” he asked. “Not knowing might be a lot easier for you to live with than what we might dig up.”
Jane paused. “I guess I really want to know,” she concluded.
“You want to know enough so that I should try to find the lady in Paris and put a stringer on finding this Royce woman’s family? Because Andrews Global Network could easily find out that I’m snooping.”
Jane thought for a moment and then decided. “If you can do the fieldwork, I’ll stick with the newspaper morgues.”
21
Jane smiled when she let herself into her own apartment. It was little more than a closet after a week in William Andrews’s penthouse, and the furnishings were bland. But it was hers. She had felt the heat of the spotlight and now she savored the delights of her anonymity. She kicked off her shoes, changed into jeans, and then scanned a week’s worth of mail while she waited for her coffee to perk. Then she sat down at her computer, logged on to the Times’ morgue, and began searching for Selina Royce.
It didn’t take her long. She started with the name and the year of Kay Parker’s death. When that came up blank, she went a year earlier. Two entries popped up. The first was an article on her move to the Andrews Cable News network from a cable service in San Antonio, Texas. Andrews had acquired the property, installed a new manager, and then brought Selina to New York. The second was a photograph taken at a cable news awards dinner. She recognized Andrews, a bit younger and leaner, and Robert Leavitt, whose hair was longer and parted in the middle. She also picked out Gordon Frier, one of the executives she had met on her trip to Paris. There were three women in the photo, one flashing Kay Parker’s society smile. Jane had to check the caption to identify Kim Annuzio, who, with her
hair styled and wearing an off-the-shoulder dress, didn’t at all resemble the executive in slacks and blouse. Then, seated between Andrews and Leavitt, was Selina Royce, terribly serious and very attractive.
Her look was evening-news grave rather than morning-news giddy. She wore her dark hair long and close to her face. Her chin was held high, displaying a long neck that blended into perfect shoulders. Even in the computer reproduction of a grainy news photo, she seemed a happy marriage of brains and body, not at all unlike Kay Parker.
There was William, sitting comfortably between Kay and Selina, touching neither one of them and totally involved with the camera. It was a scene of harmony at a moment of victory, with the two women as alike as a pair of queens flanking the king. Yet within a few months Kay would be dead and William would be paying a monthly stipend to keep Selina in Paris. It seemed impossible. Jane couldn’t imagine what must have happened that morning at the ski lodge.
She went back through all her printouts. Over and over again was the mention of an intruder, a figure who seemed to have arrived from nowhere and disappeared without a trace. Someone Robert Leavitt would have had to pass on the road as he drove up from the inn to William’s aid. She found the newspaper report on the neighbors who had been questioned. What struck her was that none of them knew the others except by name and for a passing nod. They were all successful families who came up to the mountains on weekends precisely to be alone. They were escaping the business and social ties of the city and had no interest in making new friends in the woods. They all said that they knew who Andrews was but had never met him. There was no reason why any of them would be involved in either his business or personal life.
So who was the intruder?‘Jane asked herself. Someone who arrived and left on foot. A hunter who happened on an expensive house that he thought was empty, broke in, and then panicked when he was caught? Or perhaps a professional sent by someone from either Kay’s or William’s past? Social leaders and business dynamos left a wake of drowning enemies yearning to be avenged. But they generally weren’t people who would go to a hit man.
Jane reacquainted herself with the speed of the inquiry. Kay’s body had been shipped, mourned, and cremated in just a few days, without ever being scrutinized by a medical examiner. The local sheriff had never secured the crime scene but had, instead, sent a posse out to search the vast wilderness of the Adirondacks. The state police had been polite and deferential in questioning William Andrews and had been careful that their investigation wouldn’t track mud across his carpet. They simply accepted his version of the tragedy and tried their best not to inconvenience him.
He had testified only once, at the coroner’s inquest, and without any cross-examination. The officials had kept apologizing for asking him to repeat the painful events and seemed more relieved than he was when the ordeal was over. The report specified Kay’s death as a homicide, caused by a massive trauma to the head. It noted that death would have been instantaneous, ending any discussion about whether Andrews should have called a doctor before he called his business associate.
Jane re-read Robert Leavitt’s interview. He had traveled up to the Adirondacks with Andrews and his wife for a business meeting that was part of William’s holiday. Other executives from the company had arrived separately and left that night. Leavitt had been preparing to leave himself when the call came in.
He immediately got into his car and drove the long climb up the twisting mountain road. When he arrived at the lodge, he found William slumped on a sofa, with Kay’s body behind him at the foot of the stairs. Kay, he said, had been gruesomely decapitated. William was wounded in the arm and chest. There was blood all over the steps leading up to the second floor.
Leavitt phoned the police. Had he considered calling a doctor first? No, he said. There was no question that she was dead. No, he hadn’t touched the body. There was no need to. He could tell at a glance that she was gone. But he saw that William needed medical attention right away. He called the doctor down in town. The doctor had already been informed by the police and was on his way.
Why didn’t William Andrews call the police? He was wounded and hardly coherent. Why didn’t Leavitt call the police first, before he started up to the chalet? Because William Andrews seemed vague and confused. Leavitt didn’t know what to make of the call until he reached the lodge. What did Andrews say on the telephone? Just that there had been a tragedy and that Kay was dead. He asked Leavitt to come immediately. Didn’t the fact that Mr. Andrews said his wife was dead suggest that Leavitt should have notified the police? It should have, but it was all so unbelievable. He had been with her just the night before. It seemed more as if something had happened to William. Finally, had he seen anyone coming down the road as he was heading up? Not that he remembered, Robert testified. But he couldn’t be sure. He was fixated on getting to the Andrewses’ house and probably wouldn’t have taken notice of a car going down the hill.
Pretty straightforward, Jane concluded. If it wasn’t an intruder, then the only other suspect was William Andrews. But according to the coroner, Andrews had been sprayed with the blood and gore of his wife’s shattered skull. So he had to have been behind her when she was shot in the face. Who else could have done it? One of the business associates who had been at the meeting? Perhaps someone had intended to threaten William but had been attacked by Kay. Jane could visualize a scene where a wife would jump between her husband and his attacker. But William would have recognized someone from the meeting. And besides, Leavitt probably would have noticed a colleague passing by even if he wouldn’t have been aware of a stranger.
Absent from any of the reports was mention of Selina Royce. She wasn’t involved. She wasn’t a witness. So what could she know that would end her promising career as a television personality and drive her into European exile? What hold did she have on William Andrews that could possibly be worth over a million a year?
Jane re-examined everything, finally focusing on the only still-open questions. What was the meeting about, and who was at the meeting? Answers to those questions might suggest a motive and might produce additional suspects.
In the morning she phoned Roscoe and told him about Selina’s connection to San Antonio. That might be the best place to start his inquiries. Then she added the information about the business meeting the night before the killing. Could that be relevant? The police had never explored it. Then she returned to the city to meet with her caterer and decorator.
There was a message waiting from Ann Packard that set the wedding date for the Saturday four weeks away. Mr. Andrews had freed up his calendar, and she was quite sure that the others would be able to rearrange their commitments.
So it was the Saudi prince who would be inconvenienced, Jane told herself as she called back with a quick thank-you. She oozed that it must have been difficult rearranging so many busy schedules, trying to win her husband’s secretary as an ally.
Eileen McCarty told her that the swimming pool people were up on the roof, checking the dance floor that automatically closed over the pool. “Wonderful!” Jane gushed. All of a sudden things were falling into place. She wanted the dance floor down for the wedding and reception.
The caterer’s meeting also went smoothly. Peter Tipper arrived with an assistant and presented a menu of heavy hors d’oeuvres that included the cuisine of the entire civilized world, as well as dishes from regions still suspected of cannibalism. A taste of each would be more food than a five-course feast. The bar was Dom Pérignon champagne, Macallan twenty-year-old scotch, and Hennessy cognac. The liquor was top-shelf—even the tequila had been aged— and the beer represented eight different countries. Hardly a simple wedding reception for a few close friends, Jane thought. This was her first opportunity to cut the ties to Kay Parker’s extravagance.
While Tipper looked on in horror, Jane began cutting the menu, starting first with the foods she couldn’t pronounce. She reduced the assortment of hot hors d’oeuvres to six and cut the champagne supply in ha
lf. Tipper groaned. Then Jane added a beer to the list, a local brew in a tacky green bottle that she had heard Roscoe order a number of times. Eileen took Peter and his aide up to the roof garden to measure for their tent and kitchen setup. The construction estimate, Jane noticed, was more than the annual rent on her apartment.
The decorator, Arnold Kallen, was impressed the moment he stepped off the elevator. As he went from room to room, he rattled off the names of colors, materials, and furnishings, his voice growing higher with each new name that caught his eye. Only once did his glance seem disapproving. He stood near the piano, pursed his lips, and then decided that it should be rotated about twenty degrees to improve the view of those sitting at the piano bar. He pronounced the first floor “glorious” and said he “wouldn’t dream of changing it.”
The second floor was a different story. He suggested exactly what Jane wanted to hear. The guest rooms needed to be brightened, the children’s rooms should be youthful and frivolous, and the office could be modernized. Kallen took copious notes and measurements. He stopped dead when he reached the doorway to the master bedroom, seemingly undecided whether to laugh or genuflect. Then his hands gestured wildly. “Is … Mr. Andrews … comfortable with this?”
“He sleeps across the atrium,” Jane said.
The decorator nodded and tried to be diplomatic with his next question. “Who does … sleep here?”
“No one has for several years. It was Mr. Andrews’s first wife’s room.”
“And both you … and Mr. Andrews … plan on …”
The First Wife Page 17