The two medics looked at each other over Elias’s body but said nothing.
“Next, call Simon Cabot in London and ask him to call me on my cell phone. If the newspapers call, say Mrs. Renthal is at the hospital with her husband, and a statement will be forthcoming later in the day. It’s urgent that you get Simon Cabot in London to call me on my cell. Tell Gert we won’t be in for dinner as planned and tell her she’s free to go to bingo night at St. Ignatius Loyola. Call Smythson’s in London and tell them to cancel the order for the invitations to the party for the opening of the new house, and cancel that fancy calligrapher Simon Cabot hired to address the envelopes. Say there’s been a postponement. Oh, yes, and call the manager for the Aquacade act at the Seraglio Hotel in Las Vegas and say that we have to cancel for the present time.”
Watching her unconscious husband as the ambulance, sirens screaming, raced for New York–Presbyterian Hospital on One Hundred Sixty-eighth Street and Broadway, it occurred to Ruby that the indoor swimming pool she had copied from the indoor swimming pool at the Hearst Castle in California, and where she planned to give an Aquacade cabaret on the night of the party that would transform the Tavistock mansion into the Renthal mansion, might only be used for Elias’s physical therapy, if he should live. The new trainer, Jaime, who had been the trainer for Konstantin Zacharias, right up until the night Konstantin was murdered at the villa in Biarritz, would guide Elias through his laps and kicks on his paralyzed left side. In her mind, she wondered if she would ever see her beautiful indoor swimming pool with hundreds and hundreds of gardenias floating in it, with synchronized swimmers and divers of great beauty performing to music, as she and Baroness de Liagra had planned in great detail over the previous months.
CHAPTER 21
IT WAS GENERALLY AGREED AMONG THE STAFF AT New York–Presbyterian Hospital that Mrs. Elias Renthal, or Ruby Renthal, or just plain Ruby, depending on how well you knew her, was a diligent and devoted wife during her daily hospital visits, reading the financial papers aloud to her husband, refusing to believe that he could not hear or understand her in his coma state, as the nurses kept telling her. “Of course he can hear me. Even in a coma, he wants to know the financial news. I know my Elias,” she said over and over to the nurses. “Money’s his favorite subject. That’s why he and Konstantin Zacharias were so close.”
The nurses and interns were utterly captivated by the glamour of Ruby, who dressed up for them each day and thrived on their compliments. Often she brought baskets of superb treats that Gert had made especially for them. She even promised that she would have Gert make her famous fig mousse for the staff, the way she used to make it for the late Adele Harcourt, after whom the private wing of the hospital where they all worked was named. “Tell Gert thanks,” the nurses would tell Ruby, especially Tammi Jo, who always ate three helpings and said Gert’s goodies were worth getting fat over. Word spread. For the first time in years, the Renthals were being discussed at lunch and dinner parties.
“Elias is still in a coma, but I hear that Ruby reads him the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times every morning,” said Addison Kent. His informant was an orderly at the Harcourt Pavilion, who had actually tasted Gert’s fig mousse when Ruby’s chauffeur, Jacques, carried it into the Harcourt Pavilion for Ruby to give to the nursing staff, the interns, and the orderlies. It was only a coincidence that Addison happened to be having what he called an affair-ette with the handsome young orderly who took Elias’s temperature each day, tested his heart-beat, and gave him enemas.
It was inevitable that the story of Ruby’s devotion would appear in Toby Tilden’s gossip column in the New York Post. Addison called Simon Cabot in London, and Simon called Toby Tilden in New York, and Toby Tilden called a thrilled Addison Kent, who always read Toby Tilden’s column the minute he awakened each morning. He saw the opportunity to make an important and useful alliance with Toby. Addison gave Toby bits of social information he heard at his lunch and dinner parties as the society walker for Perla Zacharias, and Toby wrote wonderful things in his column about Perla Zacharias’s great generosity. Mrs. Zacharias enjoyed having her philanthropy publicized. Addison Kent missed the perks he had enjoyed when he had been the walker for Adele Harcourt, the most revered woman in New York. With Adele now gone, that position was wide open, and Addison dedicated himself to helping Perla Zacharias ascend to it, no matter what it took. He would ride her sable coat-tails all the way to the top.
CHAPTER 22
LIL ALTEMUS ALWAYS GOT A LITTLE MIFFED WHEN her stepmother, Dodo Van Degan, kept her waiting at the corner table in the back room of Swifty’s for their monthly lunch, which neither of them enjoyed. She sipped her white wine as she looked around the room to see who was there. She waved to Ormolu Webb, who was having lunch with Dexter Grenville, the nephew of Billy Grenville, who had been shot to death by his wife, Ann. Lil always reminded Dexter that his grandmother Alice Grenville had been a great friend of her mother’s and that they had had houses next to each other on Bellevue Avenue in Newport in the summers. “The Grenvilles were the real thing,” Lil often said when their name came up in conversation, after Gus Bailey wrote the book that brought the almost forgotten murder up again.
“Hellohowareyou?” Lil said to the very rich Carlotta Zenda, who was at the next banquette, in the tone of voice she used to use when she had money and had to speak to what she called the “new people.” It bothered her that people like Mrs. Zenda no longer yearned to be accepted by her. They had passed her by. Mrs. Zenda had become head of the board of the Metropolitan Opera, a position of social importance held by Lil’s mother from the 1940s until the day she died. “It’s the beginning of the end when these new people take over positions like that in New York,” Lil had said on many occasions when referring to individuals such as Carlotta Zenda. Mrs. Zenda laughed when Lil’s line was repeated to her. “She takes the Madison Avenue bus, Perla tells me,” Mrs. Zenda replied.
“Hi, Lil. Sorry to be late,” said Dodo, sitting down after Robert pulled out the table. “Octavio tells me you’re already on your third glass of white wine. That’s how my late alcoholic mother used to start her days. How do you like my new seventy-five-thousand-dollar face-lift?”
“Dodo, for god’s sake, I hardly recognized you. You look completely different. And your hair! What in the world have you done to your hair?”
“Had it cut. Had it dyed. Had it highlighted. That’s all,” replied Dodo, who was pleased with her transformation.
“It’s awfully blond,” said Lil, looking at Dodo’s hair and frowning.
“I don’t give a rat’s ass if you don’t like it, Lil. Xavior likes it. That’s all that matters to me,” said Dodo.
“There is no need for vulgarity, Dodo,” said Lil, in a haughty voice. “I didn’t say I didn’t like it. I said it was awfully blond. That’s all.”
“Awfully blond is the point, Lil, according to my lover.”
“And your clothes! You used to look so dowdy, so old-maidish. I saw that suit you’re wearing at Oscar de la Renta’s fashion show and then at Bergdorf’s. Too expensive for me, of course. I was shocked at how much it cost.”
“That’s the point too. Xavior picked it out, and I can afford it,” said Dodo. “I’m a rich widow with a gay lover I simply adore and, more important, am adored by.”
“Oh, Dodo, I mean really,” said Lil, making a gesture of mock despair at the utter inappropriateness of Dodo’s affair with a gay undertaker. “You’re not thinking of marrying this Xavior person from Grant P. Trumbull Funeral Home, are you? Don’t count on me to call that one in to Kit Jones to announce your engagement in her column.”
“Of course I’m not going to marry Xavior. I simply adore living in sin. It’s a much more permanent commitment.”
“Oh, for god’s sake, Dodo. People are still talking about you riding in the front seat of the hearse at Adele Harcourt’s funeral, and you and Xavior shouldn’t have been laughing. I was never so embarrassed in my whole life. Between yo
u in the hearse and Elias Renthal having his stroke or heart attack or whatever it was in the men’s room of the Butterfield, you ruined poor Adele’s funeral.”
“I’ll have a gin martini straight up, three olives, Octavio,” said Dodo.
“How in the world do you know that waiter’s called Octavio?” asked Lil. “I come here every day for lunch, and I don’t know his name is Octavio.”
“You’re not paying attention, because I call him by name every time we come here. Also, Xavior had quite a crush on him before he met me,” said Dodo, hoping to make her stepdaughter apoplectic.
“Oh, look,” said Lil, her attention diverted from Octavio. “There’s Perla Zacharias joining Carlotta Zenda. Someone said the other night she was back in New York. She’s giving money in every direction, people say. All the predictable social-climbing charities. The opera. The museum, the Whitney, MoMA, you name it, she gave to it, and all the board members are having her to dinner in return. And I can barely even speak about what is happening with the Manhattan Public Library. Darling Adele must be spinning in her grave. Oh, look. Now Addison Kent is joining the ladies. It’s perfect. He’s supposed to be the one who phones in all the positive publicity about Perla to Toby Tilden, or so Ormolu tells me.”
“Xavior once had a little fling-ette with Addison Kent in the toilet of the funeral home at the time of Winkie’s death,” said Dodo. Lil hummed and shook her head and waved her arm in the air, as she always did when Dodo talked dirty to her, pretending not to hear. “He told me that Addison has given up his job in the jewelry department at Boothby’s auction house and become the permanent walker of Perla Zacharias, taking her everywhere she is asked, even to the White House, where she sat next to the secretary of state. He takes Perla’s thank-you notes to Brucie, the florist at the Rhinelander Hotel, to send with masses of orchid plants to her hostess of the night before.”
“I’m riveted,” said Lil.
“I can’t believe I’ve told you some gossip you don’t already know,” said Dodo. “Are you going to snub Mrs. Zacharias, as usual?” asked Dodo.
“No. These days Mrs. Zacharias snubs me. Once I moved out of the Fifth Avenue apartment, she never had the slightest interest in getting to know me anymore. Money talks. Actually money screams, as Dolores De Longpre used to write.”
IN HER relationship with Xavior, Dodo Van Degan was happy for the first time in her life. She loved to hear all the news of the town that he had heard from Jonsie at the wine shop on Madison Avenue and from Brucie, the florist at the Rhinelander Hotel. She often sat with Xavior at night in the Grant P. Trumbull Funeral Home when he was embalming a body. Afterward they would fool around a little. Just the previous night, Xavior had had his face between her legs and had said to her, “This is better than rimming.”
Most of all, though, it thrilled her that she, a born mimic, could keep Xavior in hysterics as he went about his work with her accounts of her lunches with Lil Altemus. Lil and her daughter, Justine, had always just ignored Dodo. She was a family embarrassment. She had been a poor, distant relation of the Van Degans when her father had jumped overboard off the Queen Elizabeth in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean after an immoral incident with a seventeen-year-old Cockney deckhand in the engine room had scandalized the voyage. Dorothy Kilgallen, who happened to be on board for the maiden voyage, wrote a front-page story in the Journal-American, giving every detail of the perverted shipboard encounter, which caused enormous embarrassment to the Van Degan family. Dodo’s mother, a hopeless drunk who once had been considered a beauty, had long lost her looks and spent more time at Silver Hill than she ever did with her forgotten daughter. Dodo grew up sleeping in maids’ rooms of rich relatives, going to public school rather than Brearley, where her cousins all went. Now, in her new incarnation, she loved the feeling of making Xavior laugh. She felt honored when Xavior told her that his friends Jonsie and Brucie thought she was a camp. Dodo didn’t even know what a camp was, but she liked the sound of it and took it as a compliment, as it was meant to be. Xavior was very good at needlepoint, and he made a needlepoint pillow for her birthday that said MY FAVORITE CAMP. No one had ever given her a gift that was made just for her before. She kept it propped up against the pillows on her side of the bed.
CHAPTER 23
PETER LOMBARDO, GUS’S SLANDER LAWYER, HAD been hard at work trying to prepare Gus for the upcoming deposition. He had just hired another, younger lawyer in the firm, Miranda Slater, whose parents Gus knew. She asked him the difficult sort of questions that Win Burch, the greatly feared lawyer for the former congressman Kyle Cramden, would probably ask him, using the mocking tone of voice that Burch was certain to use. He was known to bring people to tears during depositions. These theatrics were taking their toll on Gus, and Peter Lombardo could see it.
He and Gus had become close in the months of preparation, and Peter thought that Miranda Slater, the smartest and toughest of the younger lawyers in the firm, would be tougher on Gus than he would, or could. They had listened to a tape of the radio show on which Gus had said that he felt Kyle Cramden knew more about the disappearance of Diandra Lomax than he had ever let on, which was the basis of the slander suit that was so complicating his life. Just as difficult was the matter of going silent on the subject, which of course was required at present, and which Gus had a hard time doing. But he soldiered on—refusing to discuss the lawsuit or the upcoming deposition—for fear of being quoted.
On this day, however, Peter Lombardo was waiting for Gus when he arrived at his office and was without the newest addition of their legal team, Ms. Slater.
“Gus,” Peter said uneasily, “something unexpected has come up. I had a call from Win Burch this morning.”
Peter dispensed with the usual morning handshake. Gus took a deep breath.
“Oh, dear,” he said. “I hate the sound of your troubled voice, Peter. What terrible thing has Win Burch wrought now?”
“I’m afraid this is going to upset you, Gus.”
Peter walked into his office and offered a seat to Gus, which he readily took.
“Go on.”
“Two men of foreign origin who claim they were trained in intelligence by the Mossad in Israel went to see Win Burch and Kyle Cramden. They claim to have done Perla Zacharias’s investigation of Augustus Bailey, meaning you.”
Gus sat up, startled, and gazed at Peter wide-eyed.
“Me? Perla Zacharias did an investigation of me? She’s getting involved with the lawsuit?”
“The investigation began after you started writing about her, and it’s apparently escalated since the book deal. She doesn’t like you, Gus. She knows you know things. She’s after you. People say she always gets even. She knows how upset you are about Kyle Cramden and Win Burch.”
Gus replied, “I shouldn’t be surprised, really. I always thought I was being followed, and I had my suspicions as to who was behind it. Did I tell you about the time at Claridge’s in London when I went into my room and there was a man standing there?”
Peter rested his hand on his chin. He couldn’t help but notice how weathered Gus seemed. The light in his eyes had faded, replaced by a new, uncertain appearance.
“Gus,” he inserted calmly, “if you were being followed, you certainly didn’t tell me. That much I would’ve remembered.”
Gus leaned forward, placing his hands on the edge of Peter’s desk.
“I was scared, Peter. My heart was beating a mile a minute. There was this big tall heavy guy with a mustache in a gray flannel suit. Cool as a cucumber. Not a bit unnerved by my unexpected arrival. ‘I was checking your minibar, Mr. Bailey,’ he said. So likely. Third World men with aprons to the floor check the minibars at Claridge’s, and they don’t know the names of the guests whose minibars they are checking. I was afraid of him.”
“It sounds like you interrupted whatever it was he was there to do.”
Gus nodded.
“I opened the door. I said I never use the minibar. He left.”
&n
bsp; “Jesus, Gus.”
“How did he get a key to get into my room at one of the most expensive hotels in the world? What was he looking for, or what was he planting?”
Peter sighed, crossing his arms over his chest. Gus went on to explain how a year later he saw the same man in New York at an auction at Boothby’s of Perla Zacharias’s Fabergé eggs. Gus spoke frantically, explaining how the man recognized him and then vanished quickly into another room. Gus was convinced he must have been one of Perla’s guards.
“He gave me the creeps,” Gus remarked, almost in a whisper.
Peter smiled, reaching out his hands.
“Oh, come on, Gus. Really? The same guy? Are you sure? Don’t you think you’re just overexhausted with this whole ordeal?”
Gus crossed his legs and folded his arms.
“Don’t placate me, Peter. It was the same guy. I told you about the doorman in my building who told me a man in a green Nissan was following me every time I left the building?”
“Gus, that could simply be a crazy fan. You’re getting carried away.”
Gus closed his eyes for a moment and cleared his throat. While he knew he sounded crazy, it was all true. The guy had been there, and Gus wasn’t about to dismiss it as a mere fluke. Things like this just happen to me, he thought. They always have and always will.
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