Murdering Mr. Monti

by Judith Viorst

Sunny went off to the ladies’ room to do a few more repairs on her sopping self. I bounded from my banquette and went right along with her. As we stood in the white, mirrored room, I stared searchingly into her Leslie-Audrey eyes and, using a tactic I’d once proposed in a column called PRETEND YOU ALREADY KNOW, I said, “You slept with my husband this weekend. Why are you starting in with him again?”

  And then—and I’ll be the first to grant this was not mature behavior—I made a fist and punched her in the shoulder.

  “I can’t say I blame you for doing that,” Sunny said to me, slowly rubbing the place where I’d landed my punch. “Not only don’t I blame you, but I love and admire you, Brenda, I always have.”

  “Then why are you fucking my husband again,” I shrieked, as one of Edmund’s former mistresses half-entered the rest room and instantly backed out.

  “It was”—Sunny rewrapped her wraparound skirt so the coffee stains wouldn’t show—“a regrettable lapse. It happened, yes‧—she emptied espresso out of her brown suede shoes—“but that’s not what he came for. It happened and it was—” She silenced herself; a sensual shiver shook her fragile frame. “But truly, Brenda, that’s not what he came for.”

  Sunny’s admission, however, was what I had come for.

  “I hope you gain forty pounds,” I said to Sunny. “I hope you start sprouting unsightly facial hair. I hope the Smithsonian fires you for conduct unbecoming a paleontologist. I hope every night you go home and nobody’s there. I hope your tax returns are audited annually. I hope—” I took a deep breath “—that all four quadrants of your mouth require gum surgery.”

  In the horrified silence that followed, I noticed that all of Edmund’s exes had entered the ladies’ room. Sunny and I departed, our heads held high.

  “Don’t tell Jake I had lunch with Edmund,” I said to Sunny as we approached our table. “And I won’t tell him I tricked you into telling me that you two went to bed.”

  ‘Tell him whatever you wish,” Sunny said, her legendary poise still fully intact. “I don’t plan to see him again—as either a lover or a friend—unless he leaves you.”

  • • •

  I hated “regrettable lapse” and “unless he leaves you.” But it was something else Sunny said that seared my soul, something that she whispered to me while Edmund was saying goodbye to his former mistresses. “I know you’d never do to me—or to any woman, Brenda—what I’ve done to you. I acknowledge how cruel and destructive this can be. And I just want to say”—she swallowed hard—“that in a better world, all of us would have your kind of purity, integrity, and decency.”

  I went right home and called up Birdie Monti, To-ward whom, on March 18, I’d been cruel and destructive. Toward whom I’d failed to display any kind of purity, integrity, or decency. Toward whom—although I’d been trying to forgive myself—I continued to feel astonishingly guilty.

  I reminded myself that she didn’t (and never would) know I had slept with her husband and that I wasn’t the one who had broken up her marriage and that, aside from adultery and (okay) attempted murder, I was basically, a decent human being. I still, however, felt guilty toward Birdie Monti. I needed to hear that she was doing okay.

  “Definitely okay” was Birdie’s cheerful response to my query. “My grandbabies are a blessing—the lights of my life. I’m sure going to miss my little Brittany when I move out of Gloria’s.”

  “You’re moving?” I asked. “Where are you moving to?”

  “Why, back to my house, of course. I think I mentioned it’s in my name.” Birdie sounded magnificently serene. “My lawyer told Joseph yesterday that he had to be out of my house by October eighteenth.”

  “But where will he live?” I asked.

  Birdie, busy burbling words of endearment to baby Brittany, somewhat sharply replied, “That isn’t my problem.” A few burbles later she added, “He told my lawyer that he’d probably move to the city. Let him call real estate agents. They’ll find him a place.”

  This conversation returned to me as I drove, the next morning, from pharmacy to pharmacy, filling my three innocuous prescriptions for what added up to deadly poison pills. To murder Mr. Monti I needed the will (which I had) and the way (which I’d just acquired). But how, I needed to figure out, would I find the opportunity to get close enough to slip him the fatal dose?

  I’d been brooding about this question since Miami.

  It came to me in a flash as I was paying (in cash, of course) at the third pharmacy, that Birdie Monti had given me my answer.

  10

  •

  BANANA, BANANA, BANANA

  Attempted murder was getting awfully expensive.

  What with the long blond, wig, the rental car, the uniform, the table, and so forth, my Swedish masseuse disguise had cost three hundred dollars. By the end of Monday afternoon I had spent almost four hundred more (including the past week’s doctors’ appointments and poison pills) to prepare to present myself to Mr. Joseph Augustus Monti as Elizabeth Fisher-Todd, ace real estate agent.

  “Hah there,” I said in a husky honeyed Cat on a Hot Tin Roof drawl when I reached Joseph Monti by phone on Tuesday morning. “Ah unnerstan’ y’all’s lookin’ to fond a place to live in the District. Ahm your puhson.”

  (I’ll return to Standard English, but keep in mind that I’m sounding a lot like Blanche DuBois, with just a little Scarlett O’Hara thrown in.)

  “I only now decided to move,” Joseph Monti growled. “How did you already get that information?”

  “We got it because it’s our business to get it, and we’re the best in the business,” I silkily soothed him. “Fisher-Todd is a low-profile outfit with very high quality clients. We only work with”—stroke! stroke!—“the cream of the crop.”

  “Well then—” he softened; I knew that he’d be a sucker for “cream of the crop”—“what do you have to show me in, say, a luxury two-bedroom condo in north west Washington?”

  “Oh, no no no!” I replied. “That isn’t at all how we do business at Fisher-Todd. Our slogan has always been More Than Realtors—Matchmakers. And to make the perfect match between you and the place that you next will call home, I’ll need to meet you and buy you a drink and chat a bit so I can grasp your essence.”

  “Grasp my what?”

  “Your essence. I can promise it won’t take long. This evening? Caucus, on Capitol Hill? Six o’clock?”

  Mr. Monti resisted. “No, I don’t think so. I don’t think I want—”

  “I’ll be the kind of . . . bosomy one . . . with the violet eyes and black hair and a little mole—like Liz Taylor’s—on my cheek.”

  My fish was back on the line. “It sounds as if maybe more than your mole is like Liz Taylor.”

  I sighed with becoming modesty. “Well, actually, people say like a younger Liz Taylor.”

  • • •

  With my black bouffant wig and my penciled-on mole and my violet-tinted contacts, I did—in the dimly lit Caucus—look somewhat Lizish, And I figured I’d look a lot more so when Mr. Monti, as I was counting on him to do, took off his glasses in order to impress me with his big blind bedroom eyes. But I knew I must have a backup plan in case my disguise didn’t wash, and, while praying I wouldn’t need it, I had prepared one, intending, to tell Mr. Monti—if caught—that I’d tricked him into this meeting to beg for mercy. And then I’d say, “So I’m asking you, I’m pleading with you, I’m urging you, to please please please please let my family be.” And if he agreed (unlikely), I would happily flush the poison pills down the toilet. And if he refused (highly likely), I’d suggest that we have one last drink, for old times’ sake. And then he’d either sneer and leave or sneer and have that drink—in which case I’d kill him.

  “Easy to find you among these yuppies,” Joseph Monti greeted me, sliding smoothly into a chair and immediately (whew!) removing his glasses.

  “Charmed to meet you.” I reached out my hand in a crisp but certainly not unfeminine handshake. “My clients call m
e Elizabeth. I hope that you will too. And I do hope you will forgive my unbusinesslike garb.”

  “Yeah.” Mr. Monti nodded his sleek head. “I see what you mean.”

  I should note that the way I was dressed was meant to serve as a crucial part of my disguise. For what I was also banking on was that Mr. Monti’s eyes would be studying not my features but my breasts, whose bared rosy mounds had been pressed (by a shrewdly engineered bra called Lover Cups) above and beyond the neckline of my dress, and whose truly spectacular cleavage (also courtesy of Lover Cups) housed, in its perfumed depths, a simple gold cross.

  My alibi for the dress, a slinky, satiny, silvery number, was that I was going from there to another engagement—“a dinner being given by Secretary and Mrs.—whoops!” I interrupted myself. “Sorry, we never mention the names of our clients. Suffice it to say he’s a man upon whose shoulders might rest the survival of the world.”

  Mr. Monti, pleased to be numbered among my exalted clients, and even more pleased, with my unbusinesslike garb, fixed his liquid gaze on my cleavage and huskily observed, ‘That’s a beautiful cross.”.

  I thanked him and said, “I’ve already ordered us something special to drink. It’s an old and famous Fisher-Todd tradition. And while it’s being prepared, perhaps you could say some more about what you have in mind.”

  Joseph Monti’s eyes swept the room, where the Young and Ambitious were gathered, speaking—as they sipped Chardonnay—with die borrowed importance of their congressional bosses. “We’ve got the votes.” “We told HHS.” “We met with the Speaker this morning.” Clearly these kids believed they were running the world. It struck me, as I watched them playing mine-is-bigger-than-yours, that this was a perfect place to poison a person.

  “What I have in mind—” Joseph Monti swallowed hard as I leaned forward, the better to hear him, breasts rising to the occasion magnificently, “what I have in mind is that you skip that dinner party and let me take you to eat at the Lion d’Or.”

  “Would that I could,” I sighed. “Would that I could. These Washington do’s, with the great and near-great, are really such a bore. I mean, yet another evening with Bobby Dole and Nino—pardon me, Justice—Scalia is not at all my idea of a high old time.”

  “Then why not—” Mr. Monti persisted.

  “One night soon,” I promised. “But business first, Mr. Monti, and pleasure later. So would you please answer me this: If you were a tree—think carefully now—which tree would you be?”

  Mr. Monti’s eyes drifted up from my cleavage to my face. Uh-oh, he was studying me. His forehead was furrowed He cocked his head and knitted his brows and examined me some more. My bared rosy chest grew damp with perspiration.

  Mr. Monti kept staring at me. And then—at last—be spoke. “They’re wrong,” he said. “You’re really not a Liz Taylor.”

  “I’m not?” I asked him, anxiety slipping some northern sharpness into my southern-fried drawl.

  “It’s somebody else you remind me of,” Mr. Monti replied. He continued to study my face. “Someone I know.”

  I sat there reviewing my backup plan, which on second thought seemed unbelievably lame. I mean, what if—after I tell him my story—he gets really mad and telephones the police and has me arrested for impersonating a real estate agent, and then the police take me down to the station and then they frisk me and find the poison pills, and then—I flashed on Susan Hayward, locked behind prison bars in I Want to Live!, and perishing, though innocent, in the gas chamber. Large drops of sweat were dripping down my cleavage.

  “I’ve got it!” Mr. Monti snapped his fingers—one, two, three. “You know who you are? You’re a brunette Goldie Hawn.” He paused. “Well, maybe Goldie Hawn’s first cousin.”

  I almost choked with relief but I somehow managed to get a grip on myself and my drawl. “Actually,” I replied, “I’ve heard that before. Now tell me—this may sound silly to you, but it helps us compose a psychoreal estate profile—tell me what kind of tree you think you’d be?”

  Mr. Monti leaned back in his chair and sighed impatiently. “I don’t do trees.”

  Across the lively room I could see our waiter slowly making his way to our table, two foamy pink drinks aglow upon his tray. “Then let’s look over my listings,” I said, adding hastily, “and would you be a lamb and kindly go and fetch my briefcase from the checkroom?”

  Mr. Monti left. The drinks—two oversized strawberry Daiquiris—arrived. The waiter left. I whipped out the poison pills. Which, of course, I had already mashed and which, when stirred, dissolved most gratifyingly into the contents of Mr. Monti’s glass.

  Did my fingers tremble as I poisoned my former lover’s drink? I’ll try to answer the question honestly. I’d already resolved my ambivalence and made peace with homicide. I was now, as Nietzsche once put it, “beyond good and evil.” I was also, as Yeats had wisely advised, looking “on the motive, not the deed,” while keeping in mind noble Seneca’s instructive observation that a “successful and fortunate crime is called virtue.” Furthermore, I was guided by—But enough with the citations. You ask, did my fingers tremble? The answer is no.

  Mr. Monti gave me my briefcase and settled back into his seat. I removed the listings I’d typed up for the occasion. Pushing his drink a bit closer to him, I adjusted my cleavage and asked, “How central is a fireplace to your happiness?”

  “My happiness?” Mr. Monti laughed softly, bitterly. “I have no happiness.”

  “Oh,” I said in a most tactful tone, “Is that, perhaps why you’re moving? Domestic problems?”

  “Not domestic. Foreign.” Mr. Monti’s eyes were burning. “An outsider attacking the sanctity of my home.” His eyes were searing mine. “Destroying my family. Turning my wife arid children against me. But he is going to pay. They, all will pay.”

  I knew who “they” were but I had to ask, “Pay what?”

  “Their blood, their sweat, their tears, their grief,” Mr. Monti’s voice ran up the scale. “Their misery, torment, agony, and anguish. That’s what they owe me. And that’s what they will pay.”

  When he finished his loathsome litany, he clenched one fist and bit into his knuckles, which definitely underscored his point. And though I had felt no further need to justify this . . . this assassination, his words and gesture hardened my heart even harder.

  “I do,” I said, dredging up a smile, “I do admire a man of strong opinions.”

  “And I,” said Mr. Monti, his rage retreating, his eyes returning to my cleavage, “do admire your cross.”

  I’ll nail you to it, I said to myself. Aloud, I kept smiling and said, “If I might change the subject, it’s time for a toast.”

  I raised my glass and gestured to Joseph Monti to do the same. He picked up his drink, examined it, put it back down. “What”—his caressing voice had acquired an unexpected edge—“is this you’re giving me?”

  For one wild moment I thought about leaping out of my chair and trying to make a getaway. Surely the jig was up. Surely he knew. I fought back my panic and told myself that he couldn’t possibly know, that I had to stay cool, that I had to see this through. Clearing my throat, I replied to his what-is-this question with a reassuring chirp. “Why, it’s the Fisher-Todd drink, the traditional drink we always offer our new clients. A strawberry Daiquiri.”

  “Sorry. No. I can’t drink this.” Mr. Monti shoved it away as if it were . . . poison.

  “Of course you can,” I insisted, anxiety once again playing havoc with my drawl. “All of our clients drink it. Even Justice Souter drank it. You’ve got to! You must!”

  “I’ll have something else.” Mr. Monti summoned our waiter back to the table. “I’d like a—”

  “No!” I interrupted. “Listen, okay, I’ll grant that it’s sweet and I know that a lot of men aren’t crazy for sweet. But please, just this once, drink it down. It’s really important to drink it down. It’s . . . a tradition.”

  I knew I was pushing too hard. I knew I risked rousing
his suspicions. But I couldn’t—so very close to my goal—bear to fail. I took his drink in my hand, reached out, and pressed it to his lips. “You can’t”—I batted my lashes—“you can’t refuse me.”

  “I’d like a scotch and soda,” Mr. Monti told the waiter, moving my hand away and ignoring my lashes. Then, with a sort of sheepish smile, he explained, “I have the greatest respect for tradition. But the reason I can’t drink your drink”—he did a sue-me-sue-me-shoot-bullets-through-me shrug—“is because I’ve got this bad allergy to strawberries.”

  • • •

  During the forty, minutes, required to extricate myself from this fiasco, one cruel word kept tormenting my brain: Banana! Banana, banana, banana! Banana, banana, banana!, if only, I thought, as I fought back tears of regret, if only I bad ordered banana Daiquiris.

  • • •

  It took me eleven days to regain my shattered equilibrium after, my failure to poison Mr. Monti. It took me until Saturday, October 24, to once again be able to say “Can do,” Where were my organizational skills, where was my resilience, I had to wonder. For it took me until Halloween was one short week away to turn my thoughts to another murder plan.

  It had been, to be fair, a stressful eleven days. While struggling to regain my equilibrium (and while, of course, writing my column three times a week), I had, in addition, been fighting with Jake, desperately seeking Hubert, enduring attacks with sharp instruments,’ lecturing in Berkeley and Indianapolis, trying my damnedest not to throttle Rosalie, and assisting shell-shocked Jeff to move back home.

  I’ll address these matters in chronological order.

  On Wednesday, despite daily flossing and my submission, four times a year, to the preventive periodontia of Sherman Schwartz, I nonetheless had surgery—part one of a two-part series—on my gums. (Why me? Why me? I wanted to know, but according to Dr. Schwartz, in matters of the mouth there is no justice.) I spent the rest of the day adrift on a sea of self-pity and painkilling medication, in no condition to concentrate on murder.