Murder Times Two
A Reuben Frost Mystery
Haughton Murphy
MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM
For Martha,
with, if possible, even more love than before.
Let us, my brethren who have not our names in the Red Book, console ourselves by thinking comfortably how miserable our betters may be, and that Damocles, who sits on satin cushions, and is served on gold plate, has an awful sword hanging over his head in the shape of a bailiff, or an hereditary disease, or a family secret, which peeps out every now and then from the embroidered arras in a ghastly manner, and will be sure to drop one day or the other in the right place.
In comparing, too, the poor man’s situation with that of the great, there is … another source of comfort for the former. You who have little or no patrimony to bequeath or inherit, may be on good terms with your father or your son, whereas the heir of a great prince … must naturally be angry at being kept out of his kingdom, and eye the occupant of it with no very agreeable glances.… If you were heir to a dukedom and a thousand pounds a day, do you say you would not wish for possession? Pooh!
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY,
VANITY FAIR
June
1
Recollections
Reuben Frost sat down at his personal computer and got it up and working. A mechanical illiterate all his life, he had been astonished at his ability to cope with his hard-disk, 40-megabyte machine, complete with a 16-MHz microprocessor (whatever that might be). The pleasant young saleswoman at the computer store had assured him that the model he bought was state of the art, though she could scarcely conceal her surprise at the prospect of a dignified seventy-seven-year-old buying his first PC.
“What are you going to do with it?” she had asked.
“Prepare my will,” Frost had been tempted to answer, but instead had mumbled something about “writing letters.” “That is, if I can make it do anything.”
“You won’t have any problem, Mr. Frost. It’s very user friendly.”
The truth was that Reuben had bought his PC on a dare. For months his ancient friend Douglas Gilmore, retired chairman of Hastings Industries, had talked of little else but home computers whenever they met at the Gotham Club.
“Douglas, you’re an old fool,” Frost had impatiently told Gilmore on at least one occasion. “Those damnable things are for young people, not the likes of us. I’ve always used a live secretary and I expect to continue to do so for the few years I’ve got left.”
“Easier said than done, Reuben,” Gilmore had replied. “I don’t know how it is at your old law firm, but at Hastings it’s damned hard for someone who’s been retired as long as I have to get a decent secretary.”
Frost had been forced to concede Gilmore’s point. His old colleagues at Chase & Ward were unfailingly polite when he visited the office, but he had the nagging impression that his occasional requests for stenographic help were thought a nuisance.
One day Gilmore had finally said that Frost was undoubtedly right, that he probably couldn’t cope with a PC, that he was indeed a very old dog to whom new tricks would not come easily. Thus challenged, and also encouraged by his wife, Cynthia, who was eager for her husband to fill up his days, Reuben had taken the plunge.
To his amazement, he and the computer got on well. He shared his triumphs with Gilmore and his younger club-mates, many of them writers who used PCs in their work. At the Gotham bar, the conversation often concerned laptops, printers, modems and other electronic esoterica that intrigued the aging hackers gathered for their pre-luncheon drinks. Frost imagined that this talk must resemble an earlier day’s conversations, right at the same bar, about the wonders of the newfangled automobile.
Right now, on a sunny afternoon in mid-June, Frost wanted to be anywhere but before his computer in the library of his townhouse on the East Side of New York. The City had looked temptingly fresh and green when he had returned from lunch. But he had promised his wife that he would reply to an urgent request from their mutual friend, the writer Eleanor Daggett, to provide her with background on the Vandermeer family.
The City’s news media had been fascinated with the tale of the Vandermeers and their fortune ever since the poisoning of the family scion, Tobias, the previous March, at a meeting of his wife’s reading club at which the Frosts had been present. Daggett, a well-known free-lance journalist, had become a specialist in so-called “true crime” sagas. The denouement of l’affaire Vandermeer had been astonishing and, now that the drama was over, or at least ready to be transferred to the courts, she wanted to find out all she could about Tobias, his wife, Robyn, and the whole unsavory cast of players.
Frost stayed at his computer all afternoon, composing a long letter to the reporter:
DEAR ELEANOR,
As you requested, I will try to set forth what I know about the background of the Vandermeers. I will also include a certain amount of hearsay, but, knowing what a good reporter you are, I am certain you will not use anything in your book that you do not check for accuracy.
My own exposure to the family goes back to my early days as an associate lawyer at Chase & Ward in the late 1930s. The firm, then as now, handled the Vandermeers’ trust and estates work and occasional corporate problems. One way or another, I became the corporate “expert” on their affairs, and then, in 1964, I did a special piece of research for Tobias that I will describe later.
I should say at the outset that both Cynthia and I always had mixed feelings about Tobias. I don’t like drunks, particularly loutish ones, which Tobias became in the years before his death, though I can’t deny there were many times when he was utterly charming. Despite his often terrible behavior, he had a rather romantic streak that could be appealing.
It was fascinating, and singular in my experience, to observe a man not only so rich that he didn’t have to do anything—there are plenty of those—but one who actually didn’t do anything, except of course play jazz piano, stitch needlepoint and, late in life, build a collection of Dutch genre paintings. It is certainly unique when one’s only workaday concern is to keep off the Forbes 400 list of the country’s wealthiest individuals—an obsession with Tobias.
As for Robyn, her social climbing and cultural pretensions never appealed to us. But you couldn’t help feeling sorry for her as Tobias grew more sodden and meaner toward the end. And one also had to admire her deep commitment to the cause of literacy.
The Vandermeers were one of the old Dutch families in New York, arriving at the end of the seventeenth century. They didn’t come over with Henry Hudson or Peter Minuit, but they were here not much after them. (A competitor of theirs in the real estate business once remarked to me that it was too bad they didn’t come with Minuit; with the help of a Vandermeer, he probably would have gotten the Manhattoe Indians to cut their price for Manhattan below $24.)
By the early 1800s the Vandermeers had money to invest, and they put it into land and shipping. Manhattan had begun to burst out from its boundaries at the lower end of the island, and the Vandermeers shrewdly invested in well-located properties, many along Bloomingdale Road (no relation to the store; it is now Broadway). The ships they commissioned and chartered out sailed the world, not necessarily in the most respectable commerce. There is pretty good evidence, for example, that they were willing to engage in the slave and rum trades in the Caribbean and Africa and the opium trade in the Far East.
The family liquidated its shipping interests in the 1840s, producing massive new funds for investment, virtually all of which went into New York City real estate.
After the Civil War the first Tobias Vandermeer looked after the family fortune. He stuck to real estate, buying, selling and exchanging properties all over the
city.
I never knew Tobias I, who died in his nineties about 1930. But I remember tough old partners at the firm, unfazed by almost anybody, who still shuddered at the mention of Tobias I’s name a decade later. And he was supposed to be as close as the next second. From all I’ve ever been able to gather, he died unloved and unmourned—and very rich.
The modern era of the family begins with Hendrik, who took Great Kill over when his father died. (The name of the family company has always been Great Kill Holdings Corporation—an ironic title given all that’s recently happened. But it is old Dutch, referring to a stream that ran through several Vandermeer parcels and emptied into the Hudson River around Forty-second Street.)
Consolidation and expansion of Great Kill’s assets became Hendrik’s whole life. His wife had died in 1925, in the course of giving birth to Hendrik’s sole heir, the second Tobias.
Hendrik’s technique for making money was simplicity itself. He leased the land that Great Kill owned to eager developers, providing a steady and reliable stream of ground rents to Great Kill.
Hendrik’s skill in preserving the Vandermeer patrimony was the pride of his life. He never remarried after the death of his wife, and he had a very small circle of friends. One of them was Dr. Cates, the rector of the Collegiate Church of St. Nicholas, which used to be at Forty-eighth and Fifth. He accomplished a feat that no one else had theretofore been able to manage—to arouse a Vandermeer’s social conscience. Under intense pressure from the good doctor, Hendrik established the now notorious Bloemendael Foundation in the early 1960s, with an original gift of, as I recall, two million.
Hendrik’s only source of discontent was his son, Tobias. I’ve always understood—he even said so himself, in unguarded moments—that the boy had had a wretched childhood. He was raised by a series of governesses until shipped off to Hotchkiss at an indecently young age. One gathers that Hendrik tried to befriend his son, but I don’t think he ever could break through his Dutch reserve to show him anything approaching real affection.
Tobias joined the Navy in 1943, when he was eighteen, and sat out the rest of the war at a supply depot in New Orleans. He collected no medals for heroism—but he did learn three skills during his tour of duty: how to play jazz piano, how to do needlepoint and how to drink. None of which he ever forgot.
After the War, Tobias enrolled at Brown, but that lasted barely two years, after which he went to work for his father. That continued for another two and was a disaster, since the boy had no business judgment whatsoever. And his lifestyle, centered on the City’s jazz clubs and late-night drinking, conflicted with the austere work ethic his father imposed on himself and wanted his son to emulate.
Finally, they reached an understanding: Tobias would leave Great Kill and do as he pleased, supported by a healthy allowance from his father. (I believe it was $100,000 a year—big money in 1951.) All his father asked was that the boy avoid public scandal and publicity. Tobias more or less obliged; the jazz bars on Fifty-second Street and in the Village where he hung out did not attract Walter Winchell and the other gossip columnists. And Tobias at this stage did not carouse and get disruptive in public; his drinking was quiet and steady, mostly vodka and orange juice, from the time he got up at noon until the jazz clubs closed in the early morning.
When Tobias announced in 1954 that he wanted to move to Paris, Hendrik was relieved. Jazz was apparently booming in France then, and Tobias wanted to be a part of the scene. His father encouraged him, glad to have the Atlantic separating them.
It was in Paris that Tobias met Ines Amarante de Sousa, a glamorous Brazilian of twenty-two and the daughter of a well-to-do Rio industrialist, Nascimento Amarante de Sousa, who owned a string of paper mills scattered throughout Brazil.
As Tobias told me the story years later, he met Ines at the Club Saint-Germain, where he spent most evenings. Ines was astoundingly beautiful, sitting in the club’s dim light. The product of a strict Sacred Heart education, she was still very much under her parents’ control and hungered to escape.
Tobias, always happiest around music bars, his amiability fueled by his regular drinking, seemed to offer a way out, and she pursued him around Paris. After a brief time they were married in Paris and then set off to meet her parents in Rio de Janeiro and his father in New York.
Ines captivated Hendrik. She was polite and cultivated, and these qualities appealed to the old man, as did her unquestioned beauty. She was not perhaps the upright Protestant bride he would have chosen for his son, but he thought she might actually reform Tobias, and, as he told me at the time, “she certainly beats the low-class types the boy used to bring home.”
Tobias did not reform, and it was not long before Ines began creating a private world for herself. She took courses in drawing and painting and, as her English improved, art history, first at the New School and then at the Institute of Fine Arts.
Amply subsidized by her own father, Ines began to patronize the galleries and soon was a part of the art scene, leading an independent life amid an ever larger circle of artists, gallery owners and hangers-on. Tobias did not seem to mind so long as his daily (or more precisely, nocturnal) routine was not disturbed.
As their lives diverged, Ines and Tobias became, in effect, independent boarders, sleeping apart in the duplex maisonette at Park Avenue and Seventy-fourth Street. While no longer interested in each other, neither one was attracted to anyone else, so there was no reason to alter the status quo.
All that changed when Tobias and the Principessa Montefiore del’Udine (née Robyn Mayes) started their affair in, I would say, 1963. At the time I did not know all the intriguing circumstances of how Tobias had first met the Principessa, only that he was seen more and more frequently with an American divorcee with an Italian title.
Then, in the summer of 1964, the explosion occurred. Tobias announced to Ines that he wanted a divorce so that he could marry the Principessa. Indifferent as she had become to her husband, Ines summoned up a full dose of wronged-woman indignation and vowed that she would never give him a divorce.
Tobias told her he would take up residence in Nevada and get what we lawyers call an ex parte divorce without her consent. (You will recall that the only ground for divorce in New York in those days was adultery.) Ines, in her fury, told him to go ahead, with the dire warning that if he got such a divorce and married the Principessa, she would have him jailed for bigamy.
This threat sent a very scared Tobias right into the arms of Chase & Ward. Up until then, I had the impression that he was slightly distrustful of our firm, which represented his father and had represented his grandfather before him.
My trust and estates partner who would normally have dealt with Tobias’ problem was away on an extended vacation so, at Tobias’ insistence, I had to tend to the matter. I knew next to nothing about out-of-state divorces and, God knows, even less about bigamy; I’d heard others mention the bad repute of “mail-order Mexicans” and “one-day Alabamas,” but it was a subject I’d never encountered in my rather staid corporate practice.
With the help of a bright young associate, I educated myself and concluded that if Tobias established residence in Nevada for six weeks, he could indeed get an ex parte divorce without Ines’ consent that probably would be valid. And if he married Robyn in Reno or Las Vegas, where the divorce would clearly be recognized, there would be no question of bigamy. To my ignorant surprise, having never considered the matter in my life, the crime of bigamy is the act of marrying a second spouse while still married to the first; it has nothing to do with ongoing living arrangements.
I have seldom had a client more grateful for advice given than Tobias. For better or worse, it made him—and Robyn—our friends for life. We maintained the relationship through the years—helped a good deal by the Vandermeers’ generous contributions to Cynthia’s work at the National Ballet—and because of it we ended up as members of that damnable reading club of Robyn’s where Tobias was murdered.
Tobias and Robyn w
ere married just before Christmas in 1964, and she immediately set out to achieve two goals: to beguile Hendrik and to establish herself in New York society.
Accomplishing her first objective was necessary to realize the second for, at the time she married Tobias, she had practically no money. Il Principe Montefiore del’Udine had given her a title, but little else. Indeed, it turned out that he had managed to squander what money she had brought to their marriage. And Tobias’ allowance from his father, while ample, really could not sustain the level of charitable giving Robyn felt necessary to buy her way into society.
Disarming Hendrik was a formidable task. He had been horrified when Tobias dumped Ines, whom Hendrik had grown to like. And Robyn struck him as something of an adventuress.
In that he was probably correct, though to give her proper credit, she did work hard at her charities, most notably READ. Ensconced in the Vandermeer living quarters—Ines had fled to Brazil as soon as it was clear that Tobias really was going to leave her—she surveyed the charity scene and saw that literacy was a cause without a wealthy and visible sponsor. There were some small groups dedicated to childhood literacy—teaching little wide-eyed minority children to read had its drawing power—but no one was much attracted to the plight of poor, and generally not very appealing, adult illiterates. To her credit, she set out to form a committee that would promote literacy programs for adults as well as for children, and the impossibly named READ (Reading Education for American Democracy) was created.
The first time I ever met Robyn was when she came to One Metropolitan Plaza to talk with a group of us about setting up READ. Having expected a femme fatale, I was impressed. She wore what even I could recognize was a Chanel suit, a glamorous red one that showed off her lustrous brunette hair, dark eyes and trim figure to perfection. Her slight overbite, a legacy from her less-than-grand childhood, was her only imperfect feature. She was very businesslike and seemed, despite the years she had spent abroad, very knowledgeable in the ways of the not-for-profit world.
Murder Times Two Page 1