A Crazy Little Thing Called Death (29 page)

“You look better now,” Reed said. “You can do this.”

I sat for a moment with my hands in my lap. “Thank you, Reed. You’re very kind.”

“I’m not kind—I’m talking the truth. You look better.”

“I mean for not telling Michael about this afternoon.”

He took a deep breath and held it, promising nothing.

I got out of the car and went into the restaurant.

It had been a French bistro last time I’d been inside, but a zealous party planner had transformed the space into—well, hell. The restaurant was draped with long panels of diaphanous red fabric, with neon thunderbolts strung from the ceiling. Cauldrons of “flame” billowed behind the bar, and the bartender wore horns and a forked tail. The stools were jammed with middle-aged women wearing pearls and slurping strong drinks with glow sticks floating in them.

“Nora!”

A tall woman in a citron green Chanel suit hailed me from a throng near the coat check. She waved. “Over here!”

It was Nelly Barton-Flagg, my mother’s best friend and the afternoon’s hostess. For years she had been the faithful, dignified president of a charitable trust that raised money for Hodgkin’s research, but today Nelly’s triple strand of long pearls had gotten caught in the stem of her cocktail glass, and she’d lost one earring. Her glazed eyes told me she’d already consumed at least one drink before I’d arrived.

She air-kissed me with enthusiasm. “Look at you!” she cried. “So grown-up and pretty! I’m glad you could come to my exorcism!”

“Nelly, I thought this was a tea to raise money for—”

“Oh, the hell with that! It’s my divorce party! The papers came yesterday, so I decided to bag the tea and throw a shindig instead! I’ll write a check to the charity myself. Today I’m partying! Look, the band is just getting started! Have a mojito!”

On a raised platform, the restaurant staff had cleared a space for the musicians to set up. They were a wedding band, I could see, dressed in campy turquoise tuxedos, but also wearing devil horns in honor of the occasion. The pianist thumped the keys and burst into the opening lines of “Hit the Road, Jack.”

Nelly burst into throaty laughter, and her friends cheered. Many manicured hands were raised in applause. I saw drinks slosh over designer suits and drip onto sensible pumps. The exorcism was in full swing.

“Nelly, I had no idea you and Jack had—”

“He dumped me,” Nelly bellowed over the thunder of the band. “He found himself a girlfriend who’s younger than you! So I got the best lawyer in town, and now I’m free as a bird and rich as Croesus!”

“I’m so sorry—”

“Don’t be sorry,” she said. “Jack was a good provider, and that’s about it. Lousy in the emotional department, and no great shakes at picking up his socks, either. I was getting damn tired of being his mommy, so that little chick he’s found can take over—at least until he goes to jail.”

“Jail!”

Nelly laughed again. “My lawyer found out he’d been hiding investments from the IRS as well as me! So who wants to be married to a crook? I wasn’t going to spend the rest of my days in a cell because of his fancy accounting tricks! So no sad faces. Help me party, okay? Hey, Mary Ellen!”

Nelly pushed her way to greet another friend—this one holding a dozen balloons printed with the word
CONGRATULATIONS
! in cheery letters. I leaned against the bar and immediately found a mojito in my hand. The devilish bartender winked at me. At my elbow lay a pile of voodoo dolls dressed in business suits. The woman next to me picked up one of the dolls, dug a large hatpin out of a bowl and gleefully jammed the pin through the doll’s heart.

Turning away, I found myself next to the
Intelligencer
’s photographer, one of the older guys, best known for shooting pictures from the sidelines of the football field. With his nylon jacket open to show a rumpled shirt that barely stretched over his belly, he was grinning broadly and popping beer nuts into his mouth. “Hey, Nora.”

“Hi, Hank.” I had to shout over the noise.

“Great party! I’m going to ask for these assignments more often. All these bitter women looking for rebound sex? Even a guy like me could get lucky!”

I winced. Nelly was making a spectacle of herself when she probably wasn’t thinking straight. “You’ve taken enough pictures here, Hank. I don’t think I’ll be writing up this party in my column.”

He shrugged. “Okay, but maybe I’ll stick around a little longer. I want to see what develops. That’s a photographer joke, y’know.” He laughed.

I edged away from Hank, wondering if I should warn Nelly about him.

On the wall next to the bar someone had tacked up a large poster of a donkey, and two more tipsy women were playing “Pin the Crime on My Ex.”

The band concluded their first song and segued into a rock-and-roll version of “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off” amid much cheering. I saw Nelly’s arm pumping over the crowd.

I slipped my way along the bar until I found myself face-to-face with Nelly’s daughter, Jacqueline. She stood alone, sipping from a glass of what looked like plain tonic. Younger than me by about eight years and still in graduate school, she clearly felt ill at ease among the rowdy crowd of older women.

I touched her arm. “Jacqueline?”

She turned, her face frozen into a polite expression. Then she recognized me, and melted. “Oh, Nora! How nice of you to come!”

I gave her a hug and found she’d lost weight. Jacqueline had always been slightly built, but now she was hardly more than a bundle of matchsticks. I said, “I’m so sorry to hear about your parents. I had no idea.”

She nodded glumly. “I know. It’s a shock.”

“Your mom looks happy with her decision, though.”

“She might look happy now, but they’re both miserable. You’d think two smart people who’d been married for thirty-five years could figure a way to work things out.”

“I’m sorry, Jacqueline.” My heart went out to her. “Why don’t we get together for lunch someday soon?”

Before she could answer, we were jostled by the rambunctious crowd, then separated entirely.

In a matter of minutes, I came upon Crewe’s mother—an unlikely guest at such a party.

Karen Dearborne’s thin face was strained as she stood clutching her Chanel quilted handbag in front of her functional blue suit. Her hair—thinning, but still a determined shade of blond—was contained by the same black ribbon headband she’d worn for years. A double string of pearls did a good job of camouflaging the wrinkles around her throat. Best known for being afraid of catching germs, Karen also wore her trademark pair of old-fashioned white kid gloves.

“Hello, Karen.”

“Nora,” she said. “How nice to see you.”

Her tone said otherwise, but I smiled. “And you, Karen. I had dinner with Crewe Sunday evening.”

“Did you?”

I could have mentioned that her son had come to my house to plot a criminal conspiracy, but instead we made meaningless small talk about Crewe and his eating habits and his devotion to exercise, all the while trying to ignore the bacchanal around us.

At last I decided to seize the bull by the horns before we were separated. “Karen,” I said, “I’m very concerned about the Devine family. I don’t know if you’ve heard today’s news.”

She stiffened. “I try to ignore the news. I’m sorry to say so, Nora, because I know you’re related to those people. But I never liked them. Penny especially. She was a very crude woman.”

“The police are starting to dig into whether or not Penny had any children. I wonder if you—”

Karen paled. “I have nothing to say in the matter. It has nothing to do with us anymore. Topper was adamant about that.”

She rushed away from me, but collided with a busboy’s tray full of dirty dishes and glassware. A plate overturned and slid off the tray, ricocheting off her skirt before hitting the floor near her shoe. Gooey bits of deviled egg smeared her clothing.

Instinctively, I pulled out my handkerchief to help clean up the mess, but Karen took one look at my crumpled, tear-soaked hankie and recoiled as if it contained plague spores.

“Sorry,” I said, and reached for a handful of cocktail napkins from the bar. I handed them to her. “Karen, was Topper the father of Penny’s child?”

Karen glared at me. “How do you know that?”

“I don’t, but there are tests that prove whose DNA is whose. Eventually, someone’s going to figure it out.”

Alabaster pale, she bent to clean the worst of the egg from her skirt. “Why does anybody need to know? It’s been a secret all these years, and Topper paid every dime that woman asked for! He financed that boy’s life from the very beginning and never asked to see him once.”

“Never—? Karen, who are you talking about?”

Crewe’s mother gave up cleaning herself and threw the dirty napkins on the bar. “That woman never wanted him around, and when she found a home for him, Topper paid. He paid until the boy was twenty-one, which was more than fair.”

“Who? What boy?”

“How should I know? Penny gave the child away! To servants, she said. To people she trusted. And she sent Topper’s money to them so they could raise him properly. I have no idea who the child is.”

But I knew. Suddenly I understood Kell Huckabee had been Penny’s illegitimate child. Not Crewe, but Kell, who had grown up as the child of employees at Eagle Glen. Crewe’s altercation had been with his own half brother.

Karen was no longer shaken, but angry now. She glared at me. “I don’t know what kind of person you’ve become, Nora, but you’re nothing like your grandmother. She was a great lady, and I’m sure she’d be embarrassed about how you’ve turned out. You’ve utterly ruined your family’s good reputation by consorting with that—that shady character.”

Karen walked away, dodging contact with other women as she headed for the door.

I decided I’d seen and heard enough, too. I gave Karen a head start, then followed her out into the street.

“Where to next?” Reed asked, clearly relieved to see I wasn’t bawling.

Although I wanted nothing more than a trip home, I gave him directions to one of the city’s most elegant hotels. I stared out the window at the stores and restaurants we passed along Walnut Street, and wondered if I’d ever walk into my old haunts again without people whispering. Was my reputation dying at that very moment?

Reed dropped me at the hotel and promised he’d be waiting nearby when I was ready for him to pick me up again. With his cell phone number memorized by now, I went into the hotel.

The charity dinner was one of those swishy affairs for “fogies and farts,” my father used to call the aristocratic crowd—with long gowns for the women and evening clothes optional for gentlemen. Old jewelry that probably spent most of its time in vaults sparkled on elderly throats and arthritic wrists and fingers. I looked around and decided that if the guests donated as much money as their ancestors had spent on diamonds, the charity could probably quintuple its annual budget.

The cocktail hour was well under way, with solemn waiters in uniform carrying drinks and extravagant nibbles on Lucite trays. A pianist, hidden on a balcony above us, played lively Gershwin, barely audible over the hum of cultured voices. Small knots of guests strolled around, meeting and greeting.

I took a deep breath and plunged in.

“Nora.” A slim, silver-haired matron in a stunning voluminous skirt suitable for a presentation at the Court of St. James’s looked startled to see me. “What a surprise.”

“Hello, Carol.” I had already taken my notepad from my bag. “The party looks wonderful. I know you’re on the committee. Can you tell me about the decorations? For my column?”

Carol Hamilton, chairwoman extraordinaire, and a tastemaker in the city’s most conservative circles, held a slender glass of champagne before her and allowed five ticks of her watch to go by before she managed to find a proper response. “Yes, of course, dear. Why don’t I send you into the dining room to have an early look for yourself? Peaches and Petals did the flowers. They’re still doing final touches. I’m sure they’ll have all the details.”

Carol was the mother of one of my good school friends, and I’d spent many an adolescent night under her roof, even traveling to their Bermuda home a few times for holidays. I had been made to feel like one of the family, especially during the years when my parents misbehaved.

But now Carol looked through me to an oncoming guest, clearly asking me to step aside and make way for someone she preferred to be seen talking to. I realized that the murder of Torchy Pescara had already hit the five o’clock newscast. The whole city probably knew that Michael was the prime suspect in a gangland killing.

My face warm, I slipped into the hotel ballroom in search of the florist.

Forty tables had been decorated with swoops of pink linen and centerpieces that were six feet tall—great poufs of pink and yellow flowers exploding from the tops of tall glass vases balanced at the base by thick pads of moss dotted with elaborately painted eggs and butterflies. It was spring in full bloom, with huge clouds of white chiffon suspended from the ceiling. Around the perimeter of the room, six waterfalls sent streams of water cascading over artfully arranged umbrellas. The effect was astonishingly beautiful.