“Well, there’s no disputing Jack Armstrong sure is feeding her. But there’s something about that woman I can’t put my finger on. She’s hiding something. Before he died Ethan called to tell me he had something great on Whitney, but I never got a chance to find out what it was. He said it was so volcanic that even I probably wouldn’t print it.”
The thought of Whitney’s strange behavior in Ethan’s apartment popped into my mind, but I made no mention of it to Elsa. “I find Whitney to be kind and ingenuous.”
“Yes, she was ingenuous all right when she ousted Theresa Armstrong, wouldn’t you say?” Elsa was a good friend of Jack Armstrong’s first wife, and the initial support she gave Theresa in her columns after the breakup rivaled the support Liz Smith gave to Ivana after being jilted by the Donald. Elsa’s support for Theresa faded, however, as she slipped farther off into the moonscape. “I’m saying right now they don’t last another year.”
Of course, everyone knows where Don and Marla’s relationship went, but my money, or rather my former money, would have said that Whitney and Jack were going to stick. Jack fawned over his bride like a Japanese over his first-born son. “From what I understand, they are very happy.”
“They’re happy now, but just wait until he falls out of heat. Damn, I wish I knew what Ethan had on her. I’m sure it was juicy.”
My cell phone rang in the taxi on the way home. I was still forwarding all calls from my home phone despite my creditor problems. But I’d gotten rather adept at avoiding the collection man, so when I heard an unfamiliar male voice I almost hung up. Then I remembered the ad for the Jaguar in The Tribune. Though it had been running for days, I hadn’t received any calls yet.
“Are you the one with the vintage XKE for sale?” he asked.
“Yes,” I replied with mixed emotions. I really didn’t want to sell my car.
“Is there any wiggle in that price?”
“Pardon me, any what?”
“Any wiggle. Any room for negotiation. You’re asking a lot more than the car is worth.”
“That is your opinion,” I said. Deciding right away I didn’t care for his tone and didn’t want him ever setting his pompous posterior upon my beloved car’s leather seats, I ended the negotiations before they got started. “There is no wiggle, and actually the price has changed. I’m now asking $30,000.”
“You’re out of your nut, lady.”
“And that, too, is your opinion.” I ended the call and rode the rest of the way home in blessed, uninterrupted silence.
Later that evening, with my cat curled happily at my side, I looked unhappily out across the choppy waters of the lake. There had been no more calls for the car, a sign my pricing strategy was working. I knew I had to try harder to sell it. I needed the money desperately. My situation was so dire I hadn’t paid the monthly maintenance on the co-op, not to mention the special assessment. When I ran into Parker Donnelly, the co-op board chairman, in the lobby the other day, I had to tell him I had forgotten and would put a check in the mail right away. Now I avoided going out at times when I might see any fellow residents.
It seemed money was everywhere except with me. I was beginning to understand how Ethan had felt being around so much wealth and having none of his own. It was so unfair. It tore me to pieces to listen to department store clerks talk about the small fortunes they were making on the stock market. E-trade. AOL. Red Hats and CMGIs. I watched the soaring Dow and Nasdaq with frustration and listened to Alan Greenspan speak out against irrational exuberance and things soared higher. I wanted to be part of the exuberance. And it was doubly tormenting to be so destitute while everyone from waiters to shopkeepers to shoe-shine boys was getting rich and richer.
A prescient chill came over me as I realized my life was making a circle. I was heading back where Mother and I had been after Father deserted us, scraping for every penny. Except the situation was graver this time. There was no Grandmother to fall back on as a last resort. Yesterday’s paper ran a story about a Beverly Hills woman who had resorted to living in her car after her alimony ran out. My situation would be even more dire than hers if I sold my car.
I thought about Armand Peckles. He acted disappointed when I begged off on a drink after the opera last week. I knew he was still very fond of me. Perhaps if I acted quickly, I could seal a deal with him before the bank foreclosed on the co-op. Then I recalled something he said during the intermission, that after his last disastrous marriage he would sooner get a tattoo on his chest than ever marry again. Still, I might have given it a try, but in all truth, I was hedging. How would I feel if I secured Armand, and then Terrance Sullivan made one of his unpredictable appearances? It would be akin to Scarlet O’Hara settling for Frank Washington before she found out Rhett had all that money.
The phone rang and I answered it listlessly. The caller had a thick Southern accent, bringing back some stinging memories of Charleston. Though I was certain I had never heard this voice before, there was something hauntingly familiar about it.
“This here is Rufus James Burton, and I’m calling about the ad in the paper.”
“The Jaguar?” I said trying to sound affable. Things were at the point I had to consider any serious offer.
There was a silence, and then, “No, ma’am, I don’t know nothing about no Jaguar. I’m calling about the ad in The Charlestonian.”
A mystery to me, of course. “What ad in The Charlestonian might I ask?”
“Why the one offering the reward, ma’am. I’m looking at it right here. ‘Seeking information leading to the whereabouts of Ethan Campbell last seen in Morristown, South Carolina, March 1965. Contact Pauline Cook. 312-557-3836. Reward.’”
The phone fell out of my hand.
24
Soup to Nuts
“Are you still there?” I asked my mysterious caller, having recovered from shock enough to pick the phone up from the floor.
“Yes’m.”
“I’m afraid the telephone slipped. Could we start over, please? You said there’s a classified ad in The Charlestonian offering a reward for information about Ethan Campbell?”
“Yes, ma’am. ’Cept it ain’t in the classifieds. It’s a big ad on page three.”
The word flabbergasted wouldn’t even begin to describe my feelings. Someone had placed an ad in a metropolitan newspaper asking for information about Ethan Campbell and naming me as the contact. And offering a reward, no less. The ad must have cost a small fortune. If it wasn’t so beyond bizarre, I might have been impressed. Then it came to me slowly, like the sun’s corona peeking through the mist of a Martha’s Vineyard morning. A voice was telling me who was responsible for the ad, and that voice had an Irish brogue. Terrance was really determined to make sure that old woman died in peace. Normally I would have been incensed that he had the nerve to include me in his folly without asking my permission. Instead I was elated. It meant I would hear from him after all.
“Does it state how much the reward is?”
“No, ma’am.”
I thrashed about for an appropriate figure. “The reward is fifty dollars.”
“Ma’am?”
I chose to ignore the disbelief in the voice. “Yes. Fifty dollars. Now do you have information or not?”
“Well, I thought for such a big ad, there might be a little more money involved.”
I thought about Terrance. I thought about seeing him again, about his whimsical smile, and the possibility of someday running my fingers through his wiry red hair. I thought about how rich he was. Evidently, it was extremely important to him to find out what happened to Sarah Campbell Moore’s son. “All right then. One hundred dollars. But you’re going to have to prove to me that you really knew Ethan Campbell.”
“Oh, I didn’t know him, ma’am, but I surely remember him. I wasn’t but a little boy sitting in my daddy’s coffee shop. Mr. Campbell, he was at the counter eating eggs and grits, askin’ my pa about what was grits anyhow. Well, you know how kids is, walls have ears and
all, but damn if I couldn’t barely understand him, he talked so pretty. My daddy asked him where he come from and he said England. And then he gave his name. ‘I’m Ethan Campbell,’ he said. I remember ’cause it reminded me of Campbell’s soup, and I thought that since he talked so fancy, maybe he owned the soup company or something. You know the way a kid’s mind works and all. Think the craziest things. But anyhow, that one just stuck with me all my life. Not that I ever give it any thought since then, except today when I opened the paper and saw the ad. Why, it popped right back into my brain as clear as last night’s dinner.”
I knew his story was true. Otherwise, how would he have known the Ethan Campbell in question was an Englishman?
“So, Mr. Burton, what makes you think that you can tell me Mr. Campbell’s whereabouts when you only saw him once in a coffee shop over thirty-five years ago?”
“Well, because,” he drawled, “I heard him tell my daddy where he was headed.”
“And where was that?”
“Hundred bucks?”
“Yes, one hundred dollars,” I acquiesced.
“He told my daddy he was going to Puerto Rico for a job.”
I obtained Mr. Rufus James Burton’s mailing address and promised to send out a check within the week. Then I hung up the phone and stared at it, the implications of what he had told me sinking in little by little until I grasped the entirety of it. The final piece of the puzzle was in place. In 1965 Daniel Kehoe had become Ethan Campbell so thoroughly that he had even shown up in Puerto Rico and taken his job. I knew then with certainty that the skeleton found in the South Carolina swamp was the missing Ethan Campbell. The cold calculation of what my Ethan had done became crystal clear. The knowledge frightened me and for the first time I wondered how I had lived in such close proximately to evil and never suspected it.
Suddenly, this was far too much for me to handle on my own. I needed to share the story with someone. I would certainly share it with Terrance when he called, but God only knew when that would be. I thought of Sunny and immediately ruled her out. I didn’t want to hear I told-you-sos for the rest of my social life. Elsa would be even worse, because this was far too sleazy for her to leave out of her column. Then Whitney came to mind. She had said she wanted to be close. Well, we were going to be close.
The housekeeper let me into the Astor Street mansion. She led me down a long hall decorated with handpainted Chinese murals and tapestries and into a large solarium at the back of the house. The late afternoon sun was streaming in the windows and the combination of humidity and plant life, tall palms and rubber trees, leafy dieffenbachia and flowering orchids, gave one the sensation of being in the tropics. Whitney was stretched out on a wicker chair reading Vanity Fair, her slippered feet resting on an ottoman. She looked divinely comfortable in stretch pants and an oversized blouse. It was the first time I had seen her without makeup and I noticed her skin was just as luminous without it.
“Pauline!” She put down her magazine and leapt up upon seeing me. “I hope you’re all right. You sounded so serious on the phone.”
“I’m a little frazzled. I need a sounding board.”
“Well, I’ll be happy to listen. Can I get you something first?”
“A glass of wine would be lovely.”
“Miranda,” she said to the waiting housekeeper. “Could you be a love and bring us two glasses of the Jadot Puligny.” Then she took another look at me. “On second thought make it the bottle.”
“And I don’t suppose you keep any cigarettes in the house.”
She gave a pearly toothed smile. I couldn’t get over how perfect her veneers were, yet another thing to ask about when the time was right. “As a matter of fact, I do. I cheat once in a while.”
“That’s what I hoped.”
I sat down on a low-slung rattan sofa opposite her. The sound of trickling water came from a small fountain at the far corner of the room, its gentle music helping to lessen the feeling I might explode. Miranda returned with the opened bottle, an ice bucket, two white wine glasses, and a pack of Marlboro Lights. I lit a cigarette, feeling the drug-like nicotine course through my veins almost immediately. It felt good. It had been years since I had given them up—well before I married Henry.
“Can I tell you a story in complete confidence?” I asked.
She sat down next to me on the sofa, awkwardly close. Not wanting to insult her, I fought the urge to pull away from her closeness. She put a hand on my arm and said, woman to woman, “I’m your friend, Pauline. Whatever you say will stay right here.”
“It’s about Ethan. You were right, he wasn’t as nice as I thought he was. There was a lot more to him, a lot more.” My story spilled out, but this time I filled in all the blanks about everything that had happened since Ethan’s death, of my trips to England, Boston, Rochester.
“Oh, Rochester. You poor thing,” she said, petting my arm as she puffed from her own cigarette.
I went on to tell her about Charleston and the unidentified body found in the swamp. I told her about the phone call from Rufus James Burton and the British Ethan Campbell who was heading to Puerto Rico for a job. Then I told her the one thing I hadn’t told anyone else. About Ethan’s suicide note admitting to some terrible act. “I’m pretty certain now I know what that act was. He killed the first Ethan. Which is completely mind-boggling to me, because the person I thought I knew could never have done that. He could be catty at times, but overall he was a pussycat. I thought. Now I discover that he’s Theodore Bundy.”
Her silence made me wonder if the story had gone over her bleached-blond head. But I was proven wrong when she said, “You know, sometimes desperation drives people to take desperate measures.”
“You think Ethan was desperate?”
“Yes. It sounds to me like he had a dead-end life, blue collar background, not able to find any kind of permanent job. Then he came upon Ethan Campbell. He wanted to be whoever this other Ethan was and he was desperate enough to do anything to get it.”
It occurred to me that perhaps Whitney knew what lurked below Ethan’s surface better than I. My mind flashed back to her odd behavior at his apartment. “Whitney, when you first offered to help me with Ethan’s things, you said he had done you a favor.”
She turned her blond head sideways, focused on a palm at the back of the solarium and laughed an ironic laugh. “He did in a way. He threatened to blackmail me, but then didn’t go through with it.”
“What?”
“Now it’s my turn to tell you this goes no further. He knew something about me that wouldn’t be looked upon very nicely in our social circles. It goes way back before I married Jack.”
At one time I would have been stupefied by Whitney’s telling me that in addition to everything else Ethan was an extortionist, but at this point nothing he had done could surprise me anymore. My only question was what did he have on Whitney? It must have been the unshared information he tantalized Elsa with. There were a lot of avenues ripe for me to take a mental stroll, among them her habit of physical closeness to women. Or maybe she had been a prostitute at one time. Certainly she wouldn’t have been the first of that profession to make a lateral move. But Whitney wasn’t saying anything more, and her personal life wasn’t the reason behind my visit anyhow. There would be plenty of time to ruminate about Whitney after I resolved my own personal dilemma. I stubbed out my second cigarette and looked at the nearly empty bottle of wine.
“Whitney, if you were I, what would you do?”
“What do you mean?”
“About Ethan. Should I report any of it? That I believe Ethan killed someone and stole his identity?”
She mulled it over. “I don’t see what it would change. Where Ethan’s concerned, I think you could only stir up sewer water. Why not just forget about it and get on with your life?”
“Because it’s become an obsession with me.” There, I had admitted it. The thing that had been really driving me all along. I wanted, no I needed, to know the en
tire truth.
I took a third cigarette from the pack and readied to light it when a new avenue of pursuit popped into my head. In my excitement to get to Charleston and Terrance Sullivan, I’d completely forgotten about the odd man who visited Shannon Maglieri asking about her brother. The investigator. His card was still in the zipper lining of the purse I’d been carrying that day. I had intended to call him upon my return from Rochester, but ended up traipsing about the Low Country with Terrance instead. I tried to remember what I had been wearing that day. I’d been wearing a navy Donna Karan suit, which meant I would have been carrying my navy Kelly bag.
“Whitney,” I said, putting down the unlit cigarette and draining the last drop of white Burgundy. “Thanks for the ear. And wine. And cigarettes. I’ve got to go.”
25
The Truth Will Out
I more or less oozed out of the taxi, regretting that I had drunk so much wine on an empty stomach. I was definitely feeling tipsy. An unfamiliar young man wearing the building’s uniform held the door for me. He was dark-complected with a flat nose and a sweep of thick black hair that seemed to float from his square face. He was also enormous, my head barely clearing his chest.
“Good evening, Mrs. Cook.” The voice was not coming from the unknown Goliath beside me, but rather from somewhere else in the lobby. I turned to see Jeffrey’s familiar blond head seated behind the desk. “Meet Tony Papanapoulous. He’s replacing Edgar. I’m showing him the ropes.”
“Did Edgar decide to retire?” I asked, forming my words carefully so as not to slur. I did not want to give the new help any wrong impressions. First impressions are generally the lasting ones. I hoped I didn’t smell like cigarette smoke.
“Oh, Edgar didn’t decide to leave. He got decided for. Sent a schwartze delivery boy up to Mrs. Cavanaugh’s instead of Mrs. Stein’s, and I guess her door wasn’t locked, so he walked in and scared the living sh…daylights out of her. She nearly had a heart attack.”
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