Girl Watcher's Funeral (5 page)

“The designer he's interested in—it's Max now, but there have been a lot of others before Max—would produce the designs and a few samples of a new collection. Like there'd be a see-through evening gown. ‘Try it, Jan,' he'd say to me. So I'd put on the dress and go to his rooms. I didn't just strut around, you understand. It would be sort of like a date; we'd talk, and maybe have dinner or a champagne supper, and all the time he'd be looking—”

“At you through the dress,” I said.

“That's from Dullsville,” she said. “He always said you could never tell about a dress a model parades on the runway at a showing. How would it be if you wore it ‘out' somewhere? So I wore them for him—maybe a whole evening. And then he'd thank me very politely and say, ‘Tell them yes,' or ‘Tell them no, it doesn't send me.' One time a big French designer did a whole line of sleep things—little short chemise-type nightgowns that came down—well, just far enough, and billowy transparent full-length things. Sexual weaponry, Nikos called them. I wore them all one night for him while he sat propped up in bed. And finally he turned thumbs down on them. ‘Makes the woman's intention too obvious,' he said. ‘Attack too frontal.' He turned down the complete line.”

“But he liked to look at you,” I said.

“Why not?” she said. “I have a good body.” And before I could agree, warmly, she went on. “There are others who had my job before me—and got a little too old, finally. There's a girl in the next room who had it for years, and when she didn't send Nikos any more, he set her up in business for herself. She's one of the top stylists in the fashion world today—Monica Strong. I'm sure he had plans for me when I got too old.”

I didn't tell her about Tim Gallivan's remark that she was now a rich and desirable heiress.

“We're drifting away from the people who had a chance to get at that pill bottle,” I said.

“His bedroom was like a twenty-hour-a-day night club,” she said. “Close people and people he hardly knew milled in and out.”

“Let's start with the close ones.”

“Monica's still close to him,” she said. “She's dark and—”

“I met her when I came in,” I said.

“Then you know,” Jan said. “She's got style, and she's made it a profession with Nikos's help. He trusted her judgment about clothes. Taste, if you see what I mean. Fashion today like walks a tightrope between good taste and bad taste. A see-through can be beautiful or just plain sexy and cheap.” She was checking people off on her silver-tipped fingers. “There's Tim, of course—Tim Gallivan, Nikos's lawyer and financial expert. Tim is a very smart cookie about money, but you put on the Iron Maiden when he's around if you want to stay alive.”

“Iron Maiden?”

She grinned at me. “Your chastity belt—your fighting spurs, if you see what I mean. The world is Sexville to Timmy.”

“He bothered you?”

Her face clouded. “Not up to now. Nikos wouldn't have stood for it. But now, well, it looks like I'd have to dust off my track shoes.”

“Who else?”

“Right now there are the Faradays—Mike and Dodo. She was Dorothy Dobson before she married Mike. Mike's got money in the Lazar thing—but very hush-hush. He made his money in asbestos—or something. Dodo's important to the Lazar thing. You need the best models, like Suzie Sands and others, to show the collection. But you have to have real people, too. Dodo is no Jackie Onassis or Babe Paley, but she goes to the right places, and she does the right things, and she owns the right possessions. When Dodo wears a Lazar to the opera or to some brawl given by one of the In-people like a Truman Capote, then Maxie will start to get mentioned in the same breath with Balenciaga, Saint Laurent, Norell, and Galanos. Dodo can help make Maxie run—if you see what I mean.”

“And Dodo was in and out of Nikos's bedroom?”

“Everybody was. You asked me who was close to Nikos right now. The Faradays are In. Zach Chambers is In—the model agent. Zaccheus Chambers.”

“Is he the old camp in the beads?” I asked. “With the jokes?”

“You're behind the times, Mark,” Jan said. “Everybody wears beads. Zach could make Nikos laugh until he had to be sent away so Nikos wouldn't have an attack. Then there's Suzie and her lawyer. In or out of clothes, Suzie is the most beautiful girl in the world, I guess. She fascinated Nikos because she's so completely stupid about everything except making money. Then there's Morrie Stein, the photographer. Morrie is always somewhere, clicking pictures. You could be—well—making love to someone and think you were locked away in a private world, and suddenly you'll hear the click of Morrie's camera, taking shots of you from all angles.”

I took a moment to light a cigarette. “These people were all close to Nikos, you say. Why would any of them want to shift his pills so he would die?”

That little-girl frown creased her forehead. “When you were In with Nikos, you were really on top of the world,” she said slowly. “If you wanted to buy something, you bought it, no matter what the figures in your own bank account looked like. You asked and you got. But if Nikos turned on you for some reason and you were suddenly Out, it would be like your feet are in a barrel of cement and you're dropped in the river. I mean it would be like Deadsville. Cross Nikos, betray him in some way, and you were a cooked goose without Christmas to go with it. If any of us who were In thought of lining up with another team—well, Nikos had better be dead before you made the move.”

“Who was thinking of lining up with another team?”

She didn't get to answer that. The room was suddenly flooded with the sounds of the next-door brawl—voices, laughter, the percussion beat. Then it was shut off and I found myself looking at a man in a brown silk suit, Italian cut, a coffee-colored turtle neck, brown suede shoes. His hair was brown, with a distinguished sprinkle of gray at the temples, worn longish but beautifully shaped by someone like Jerry, the Madison Avenue hair stylist. He had the gorgeous perpetual tan that comes from sunshine and sun lamps. He acted as if I was the invisible man.

“Sorry to have kept you waiting, Doll,” he said. He moved with a combination athletic-ballroom grace, and folded Jan in his arms. His wide lips were parted as he kissed her on the mouth and didn't let her go for a long moment. There was nothing brotherly about it. When he did let go of her, he turned to look at me. I found myself being evaluated by the coldest gray eyes I can ever remember seeing.

“This is Mark Haskell, the Beaumont's PR man,” Jan said to the brown man. She sounded breathless.

“Michael Faraday,” the brown man said, and held out his hand. I braced myself for a crusher and got it. I knew the kind. He would take pleasure in crippling the unprepared. He turned away from me as though that ended me. “Things are pretty hysterical next door,” he said to Jan. “Like it must have been when the
Titanic
was sinking. End of the world. I had to stay with Max and some of the others to convince them it was business as usual. That's how Nikos operated. Every eventuality prepared for in advance. The ship isn't sinking at all. Only the captain died.”

A brown hand slipped up inside one of Jan's kimono sleeves. The gray eyes turned my way again, hostile.

“If your business with Jan is finished, I'd appreciate your going back to the party,” he said. “We have some rather personal matters to discuss.”

“See you around,” I said to Jan.

She didn't answer or look at me. She was leaning against Faraday, as if the touch of his brown hand inside her sleeve had turned her on. She looked hypnotized.

I stepped through the door to Nikos's bedroom and into Bedlam. The man on the red drums in the room beyond had gone orgiastic, aided by an electric guitar tuned to a decibel maximum. People had to shout at each other to be heard.

Suzie Sands still held court on the bed, with her Tommy tucked in beside her. But the courtiers were new. Zach Chambers had taken his beads and his Merle Oberon story somewhere else. A dark little man in black skintight slacks and a navy turtle neck was taking pictures with a tiny camera of Suzie and her law student. They seemed accustomed to him. He climbed on the headboard behind them and—click! He lay on his stomach on the floor and aimed up at them—click! He stood on a brocaded chair and aimed down at them—click! And people swirled all around him and the scene. I noticed everyone seemed to be getting pretty damn drunk. The photographer, who must be Jan's Morrie Stein, seemed to be part of the scenery to all of them. Suzie fondled her law student's hand, her velvet thigh pressed against his velvet thigh. Lying together on the bed, they looked as if they were floating downstream on a medieval love barge.

I was trying to explain to myself why I was doing a slow burn over Michael Faraday's appearance in Jan's room. His possessiveness toward her had triggered something in me. I didn't resent being treated like a room service waiter. These people were all old friends and I was an outsider. It was the way she'd responded. Maybe most men react as I did when a man comes on the scene whose maleness seems to glow like a neon sign. The minute Faraday had walked into the room I'd disappeared, evaporated, dissolved as far as Jan was concerned. I had been emasculated in one second's exposure to his particular excitement thing. I found I had the rather insane notion of introducing myself to Dodo Faraday in the next room and turning on my own charm—just to show him.

I looked down at my empty martini glass. I must be bombed, I told myself. I started toward the next room and the bar—and Dodo. I didn't make it.

A tawny blonde, messy-haired, in a tweed suit with a very short pleated skirt bore down on me. She had that clean, healthy, sporty look that suggested she could swim, and ski, and dance all night and still look great. She was about thirty, I thought; a good age for an old man of thirty-five like me.

“Hi, Haskell,” she said. “I've been looking all over for you. I'm Rosemary Lewis, if you don't know. Rosey to you.”

This was the fashion writer Gallivan had mentioned who was riding the Lazar train to glory.

“I was just heading for the martini faucet,” I said. “Join me?”

“After I ask you a private question in a far corner,” she said. She slipped her arm through mine and started to steer me toward the bathroom. “Safest place,” she said. “Even these people won't barge in on you in the john.”

I was in the white tiled bathroom and she had locked the door. She parted the mauve shower curtain and looked into the tub, as if she expected someone might be hiding there. When she turned to me, her sociable, chummy smile was gone.

“What's all this chatter about Nikos being poisoned?” she asked me.

So the word was out that there was something non-kosher about Nikos's death.

“Don't give me that innocent look,” Rosey said. “If there's a whispering thing going on in this beehive, Pierre Chambrun knows about it. I know his reputation. I suspect that explains your being here, Haskell, to look at girlish thighs with only a casual interest. I suspect you're male enough to respond a little more openly unless you had something on your mind.”

I sat down on the john seat and fumbled for a cigarette. The last person in the world Chambrun would want me to talk to was a lady reporter.

“There's a hole in your head I can see through,” Rosey said. “You're a secret agent for Chambrun. You're not supposed to talk to anyone, especially not me. Well, you better talk to me, buster, or I'll spill the rumors I've heard in tomorrow's column and you'll have the whole world of communications down on your backs. Convince me I shouldn't scoop the town on this and maybe I'll play ball.” Then she smiled that nice, healthy smile. “And give me a cigarette.”

I gave her one and held my lighter for her. She had me over a barrel and she knew it.

“It's a dog-eat-dog world, Haskell,” she said. She sat down on the edge of the bathtub, and the pleated skirt hiked up, revealing what were not Twiggy pipestems. “There's a hell of a lot of money going into this Lazar promotion. I am—or was—on the gravy train. Nikos liked me.”

“He had good taste,” I said.

“Don't butter me, chum,” she said. “If Lazar comes off—and with a million bucks behind him, he will, or would have—I had an exclusive beat on the whole fashion field. I was the In-kid. If the rumble that's going on here explodes before the showing day after tomorrow, I'm dead. Lazar's collection will be buried under a sensational murder story. I'll still be a dusty runner-up behind the other rag-trade writers. If the roof's caving in, my one chance to stay ahead is to report it in advance. Tell me why I shouldn't.”

“You'll blow it anyway,” I said. “Any good reporter would.”

“You're right,” she said, frowning at the ash on her cigarette. “In my trade the name of the game is ‘bitchiness.' Beat the competition no matter how—if you want to eat. But I'm a soft-hearted sucker, Haskell. Nikos was my friend. If someone knocked him off, I want his account squared before anything else.”

I believed her, and I made up my mind. “He wasn't poisoned,” I said.

“You sound certain.”

“I know,” I said. “But—that's a technicality.” I took a deep drag on my cigarette and I told her about the soda mints. Her eyes widened as she listened, and I was suddenly aware they were an extraordinary bright blue.

“That's wild!” she said.

“In spades,” I said.

The blue eyes narrowed. “You've thought about this from top to bottom,” she said, “and so has Chambrun. You realize there's something awfully long-range and casual about it. When Nikos had an attack, he would die. But there was no way your pill juggler could guess when it would happen. It happened today at four-thirty in the afternoon. But it might not have happened for a week, or a month, or a year. The last one he had was in Paris about six months ago. I was there.”