Killer WASPs (5 page)

Chapter 4

A
T THIS, WE
got a ­couple of dirty looks from a table of grumpy-­looking men in golf shorts. Holly
and I glanced nervously in Mrs. Potts’s direction, but she was nose-­deep in another
vodka and seemed preoccupied by her fried oysters. She and Mariellen were watching
the tennis matches as they snacked (well, smoked, in Mariellen’s case). They clearly
hadn’t heard Joe.

“The note said that Honey is planning to sell off a hundred acres of Sanderson land,
and that she wanted to meet with Barclay about him building houses there,” continued
Joe. “It was thick off-­white stationery, and written in black ink and block letters,
by the way.”

Just like the note in Barclay’s pocket
.

“And in this letter, she basically summoned Barclay to her house at 8:30 p.m., like
the queen would order the Spice Girls to reunite and play the Albert Hall. It was
a command performance.”

“That’s kind of late in the day for a business meeting, isn’t it?” I asked. “And Honey
Potts wasn’t even home last night. She was at Gianni’s opening, and it had to be after
eight when she and Mariellen left.”

“Mrs. Potts says she didn’t write it,” said Joe. “The police called her to ask her
about it, and she said wasn’t selling any of her property, especially to a shyster
like Barclay. It was very Scarlett O’Hara, with Honey shouting that she’d personally
chop down every tree on her property and tear down her mansion stone by stone before
she sold off a single acre of Sanderson. She’d never written any such note, nor would
she.”

We all digested this for a minute, staring surreptitiously across the porch at Honey,
wondering if her wrath at Barclay wanting to buy her ancestral acreage might have
led her to bash the hapless developer on the head and dump him under her own hydrangea
hedge.

Meanwhile, our waitress dropped off a modest plate of carrot and celery sticks. By
now, the club staff knows it’s pointless to serve Holly actual food, so they don’t
even offer a menu anymore. Actually, I was pretty hungry, given that Waffles had eaten
my lunch, but I didn’t want to interrupt Joe’s tale to order an appetizer.

“Barclay says he got there a few minutes early, at about eight twenty-­five,” Joe
added, crunching on a stalk of celery. “He was knocking on the door for almost a full
ten minutes. He was starting to get pretty steamed about being kept waiting when,
boom!—­he got clobbered!”

I could just picture poor Barclay at the baronial front door of Sanderson. I’d seen
it before when I’d gone there with Bootsie on a garden-­club tour, and it’s an absolutely
enormous, double-­height, mahogany carved monster, with a huge pineapple-­shaped doorknocker
and a beautiful limestone overhang. The blow must have leveled Barclay when he was
on a real estate high, thinking he was about to savor a tumbler of Glenmorangie from
the ancestral Potts cellars, and practically jumping for joy as he pondered how many
houses he could stuff onto one hundred acres of Sanderson land, and how much he could
sell them for (well, given his size, he probably didn’t jump for joy, but he had to
be pretty excited).

“Didn’t Honey hear Barclay banging on her front door?” Holly asked, crossing her long
legs under her caftan.

“Nope,” said Joe. “Honey dropped off Mariellen at the Merriwether place at eight,
and Honey herself was home a few minutes after that. She claims she was upstairs with
a sandwich and her TV on full blast, watching
Dancing with the Stars
, when Barclay was outside making a racket. Honey’s housekeeper leaves around 5 p.m.,
and Honey never heard a thing.”

“It’s weird that Barclay wouldn’t have at least stopped by Gianni’s restaurant opening
on the way to Honey’s, isn’t it?” I puzzled, as Holly waved down the waitress for
more drinks. “I mean, everyone else in Bryn Mawr was there.”

“Chef Gianni and Barclay hate each other,” said Holly knowledgeably. “You know they
had that huge feud that started a ­couple of years ago over a house that Barclay built
for Gianni.”

“Gianni’s place is down off Willow Road, squeezed into a tiny lot next to the Methodist
church,” added Joe, with a look of revulsion. “It’s hideous, and
orange
. Plus it turned out the house Barclay did for him was as sturdy as a double-­wide
during hurricane season. I mean, it looked okay on the outside, but the whole place
started collapsing a week after the chef moved in.”

I’d heard something about this debacle, but Joe sketched in more details: The chef
had been in a manic up-­cycle about his new house, giving his girlfriend Jessica license
to spend like a Kardashian on decorating the place, and had then signed up to show
it off as part of a house tour to benefit the hospital.

The chef had arrived home from Palazzo late one night, unlocked the door, and the
masonry around the front entrance suddenly crumbled like a stale macaroon. “The whole
foyer avalanched down on Gianni,” said Joe. “He was pinned under the rubble for two
hours, because Jessica was asleep upstairs with her iPod on, and never heard the screaming
until after midnight.”

“The chef had to have a plastic tarp around his front entrance for six weeks until
he could get the wall rebuilt,” said Holly, who clearly knew this story as well as
Joe did. She tried to keep a straight face, but couldn’t help laughing. “Sorry.” She
composed herself, being careful not to smudge her eye makeup, and went on. “Since
the chef was worried about getting robbed, not having a door
or
a foyer, he had to station one of his busboys at the entrance to his house around
the clock. And it was too late to cancel the house tour. It was so sad. I went on
it, and when you got there, there was this beautiful brand-­new garden with lavender
hedges and fig trees. But no door. Just a tattered tarp flapping in the breeze, and
a pile of debris.”

Having witnessed Chef Gianni’s nutty rage the night before, I mused, “That must have
really upset the chef. I mean,
really
upset him.”

“He filed a lawsuit against Barclay, but it was dismissed once Barclay fixed the foyer
and the door,” confirmed Holly, “which made Gianni even angrier.”

We were all thinking the same thing: It was easy to picture Gianni, a certified rageaholic,
belting Barclay on the head with a meat mallet, and then dragging the developer under
a hedge. “Could it have been the chef who hit Barclay last night?” I wondered aloud.

“Not possible,” said Joe firmly. “There’s no way that Gianni could have been at the
party, schmoozing with his guests and cooking all those lamb chops and lobster tails,
and
bashing someone’s head in at the same time.”

“Barclay himself must have a suspect in mind, though,” I mused. “Given his reputation,
he has to have a whole line-­up of enemies in addition to Chef Gianni.”

“Bootsie says that not only did Barclay not hear anyone creeping up behind him before
he was attacked, he has no idea who hit him. He blacked out,” said Holly, “until he
woke up in the ambulance. He doesn’t remember how he got from standing outside Honey
Potts’s front door to being up by the road and under a bush. And he swears he has
no serious beef with anyone other than the chef. He’s already agreed to a settlement
with the sinkhole victims. So he’s no help at all.”

“That’s bullshit. From what I’ve heard in decorating circles,” Joe said—­Holly rolled
her eyes at this phraseology, and I stifled a laugh—­“Barclay disputes every bill,
and nickel-­and-­dimes every vendor. Tons of ­people hate Barclay Shields enough to
want him dead. Or at least in pain.”

“Well, there’s definitely somebody in Bryn Mawr who doesn’t like Barclay’s adventures
in real estate,” I said. “The note in his pocket was very clear—­the person who wrote
it hates his ugly houses.”

“Remember when I went on that date with Barclay Shields a few years ago?” said Holly
nonchalantly. Now that she mentioned it, I
did
recall her night out with the developer. This was surprising, but not shocking: It’s
a fact that Holly doesn’t discriminate based on a man’s size or his character. She
only evaluates men on the basis of cash flow, because Holly is a member of one of
the wealthiest families in Philly thanks to a lucky incident with a chicken breast.
Back in the 1970s, her father was experimenting at the test kitchen of one of the
chicken farms he owned out in the Amish countryside, when he’d had an inspired moment
one wintry Wednesday. Bored of eating a sauteed boneless breast for lunch the four
thousandth day in a row, he decided to chop up some white meat into bite-­size pieces,
bread them, and have his assistant deep-­fry the little suckers.

“Darling, I just had a brainwave,” he’d told Holly’s mother that evening, “and I think
we have a new hors d’oeuvre to serve at our party on Saturday night.” Presto: The
chicken nugget was born (at least according to the Dunhams; McDonald’s would likely
disagree). Before long, the Dunhams had more chicken farms and nugget factories than
Tiffany’s has diamonds. These days, they ship frozen nuggets to gazillions of supermarkets
and delis and fast-­food joints, and the rest of their bird-­meat business is booming,
as well.

Since Holly grew up rich, she’s circumspect when it comes to her own wealth. It’s
very big in Philadelphia to
not
talk about how rich you are, unless you’re someone as blustery as Barclay Shields,
who’s known to drop at least four references to his own net worth into every conversation.
In Philly, even if your family does something way more interesting than chicken, like
owning a cruise ship line or running a glossy department store, you still take your
financial status to the grave. To add to the confusion, some of the richest ­people
drive around in junker cars and wear threadbare clothes, like Mrs. Potts. Plenty of
oddball types are of unknown financial status, like my next-­door neighbors Jimmy
and Hugh Best, two old bachelors who live in a tumbledown manor house, but whose family
helped found the Philadelphia Stock Exchange. The result is that you never know if
­people are living on Ritz crackers and tuna fish because they’re rich and eccentric,
or if they’re actually poor and had a coupon for Starkist that week.

Anyway, even though you can never discuss your own finances, you can definitely talk
about how rich other ­people are. That’s totally acceptable, and is a very popular
topic at the club, on the tennis court, and at the luncheonette. Also, it seems that
wealth has a magnetic force field that irresistibly attracts other big fortunes in
Philly—­­people with money must marry
more
money. This explains why Holly could only date rich guys, even if they were Barclay
Shields.

“My date with Barclay was three years ago, before I met Howard. And Barclay was at
least fifteen pounds thinner then.” Holly shrugged off her night out with the developer.
We all mused silently on the fact that dislodging fifteen pounds from Barclay was
the equivalent of removing one stone from the Great Wall of China.

“We went to Palazzo, but I could tell that he was cheap,” Holly added.

“Holly, even the salads at Palazzo are thirty-­five dollars,” Joe said. “How does
that translate into cheap?”

“He took home a doggie bag,” explained Holly. “And, I know he doesn’t have a dog.”

Waffles!
I shook my head at the waitress, who was pointing questioningly at my empty glass,
and started to get up. But not quite fast enough.

“Who was the guy Bootsie said you were with at Sanderson last night?” asked Joe.

“It was someone who manages the cows for Honey Potts. I, um, bumped into him just
before we found Barclay,” I said, gathering my handbag. I knew they’d both be able
to tell immediately that I had a slight crush on Mike Woodford and his tanned forearms
if I gave even a single detail about him, which would be stressful since Holly and
Joe invariably disapprove of any man I’m interested in. Plus I was too tired to get
into the details about Mike Woodford just at the moment. The rum and tonic wasn’t
perking me up the way the Barolo had last night.

Joe’s eyes had glazed over. Cows and the ­people who take care of them aren’t on his
radar.

Holly merely looked disappointed as she sipped her cocktail. As usual, I’d managed
to meet a man who had a job that was definitely in the low-­earning-­with-­no-­future-­prospects
category.

“Well, I have to go get Waffles and head home, see you two later!” I said briskly.
Just then, a slim, extremely pretty blond woman of about my age came bounding off
the grass tennis courts, up the porch stairs, and slid gracefully into a chair at
Mariellen and Honey’s table. “Mummy, you have got to stop that horrible smoking!”
she scolded Mariellen gently in a fairylike, singsong voice.

“Nice game, darling!” said Mariellen, puffing on her Virginia Slim and ignoring her
daughter’s anti-­smoking crusade. Mariellen’s normally severe patrician face broke
into a molasses-­sweet smile as she gazed at the younger woman, who looked exactly
like a junior version of her mother, down to the elegant string of pearls she wore
with her white polo shirt and spotless tennis skirt. It was Lilly Merriwether, Mariellen’s
only child and an avid tennis player who’s frequently found on the club’s courts.

I have to admit, Lilly looks almost as fantastic in her tennis outfit as Holly does.

“Ugh, Lilly,” said Holly, eyeing Mariellen 2.0 distastefully. Clearly, Holly considered
her something of a rival in the gorgeous-­tanned-­blond department.
Lilly was really beautiful
, I thought sourly, considering my own dusty afternoon of wrapping china in old copies
of the
Bryn Mawr Gazette
versus Lilly’s glamorous day, pursuing fitness and a great tan at the club. Her superb
svelteness was obviously of the type that comes from lots of exercise, fresh fruit,
and antioxidants. I, on the other hand, can only fit into Holly’s borrowed clothes
because I have a food-­stealing dog, have nothing in my fridge, and get something
of a workout schlepping antiques and benches from estate sales. In the tradition of
her perfect mother, Lilly seemed to roam the earth only to make you feel inferior
about your lowly financial status and not-­so-­magnificently tanned legs.