McNally's Secret (2 page)

“The lady I dined with tonight,” I said, “the one who surrendered the Frobisher letters—apparently you don’t recall, father, but her name is Jennifer Towley. I suppose some people might address her as Jenny.”

He raised one eyebrow—a trick I’ve never been able to master. “And was she inverted?” he asked. Then, apparently fearing he had posed an imprudent question, he hurriedly continued: “In any event, Lady Horowitz doesn’t wish to take the problem to the police.”

I stared at him. “She thinks someone in her household might have snaffled the stamps?”

“I didn’t ask her. That’s your job.”

“Why on earth didn’t she keep them in her bank’s vault? That’s where she stores her furs in the summer.”

“She kept them at home,” my father explained patiently, “for the same reason she keeps her jewelry there. She enjoys wearing her diamonds, and she enjoyed showing the misprinted stamps to guests.”

I groaned. “So everyone in Palm Beach knew she owned a block of Inverted Jennies?”

“Perhaps not
everyone,
but a great number of people certainly.”

“Were they insured?”

“For a half-million. She has not yet filed a claim, hoping the stamps may be recovered. Since she desires no publicity whatsoever, this is obviously a task for the Discreet Inquiries Department. Archy, please get started on it tomorrow morning. Or rather, this morning.”

I nodded.

“I suggest,” he went on, “you begin by interviewing Lady Horowitz. She’ll be able to provide more details of the purported theft.”

“I’m not looking forward to that meeting,” I said, and finished my port. “You know what people call her, don’t you? Lady Horrorwitz.”

My father gave me a wintry smile. “Few of us are what we seem,” he said. “If we were, what a dull world this would be.”

He went back to his Dickens, and I climbed the stairs to my third-floor suite: bedroom, sitting room, dressing room, bathroom. Smallish but snug. I showered, pulled on a pongee robe, and lighted a cigarette, only my third of the past twenty-four hours, for which I felt suitably virtuous.

I’m a rather scatterbrained bloke, and shortly after I joined my father’s law firm and was given the responsibility for Discreet Inquiries, I thought it wise to start a private journal in which I might keep notes. That way, you see, I wouldn’t forget items that, seemingly unimportant, might later prove significant. I tried to make daily entries, but on that particular night I merely sat staring at my diary and thinking of my father’s comment: “Few of us are what we seem.” That was certainly true of Prescott McNally.

My father’s father, Frederick McNally, was not, as many believed, a wealthy member of the British landed gentry. Instead,
mirabile dictu,
my grandfather had been a gapping-trousered, bulb-nosed burlesque comic, billed on the Minsky circuit as Ready Freddy McNally. He never achieved stardom, but his skill with dialects and his raunchy trademark laugh, “Ah-oo-gah!,” had earned him the reputation of being the funniest second banana in burley-cue.

In addition to his dexterity with pratfalls and seltzer bottles, plus his ability to leap like a startled gazelle when goosed onstage, Ready Freddy turned out to be a remarkably astute investor in real estate. During the Florida land boom of the 1920s, my grandfather purchased beachfront property (wonderfully inexpensive in those days) and lots bordering the canal that later became the Intracoastal Waterway.

By the time he retired from the world of greasepaint, he was moderately well-to-do, rich enough certainly to purchase a home in Miami and send his son, my father, off to Yale University to become a gentleman and eventually an attorney-at-law.

Shortly after Ready Freddy made his final exit, my paternal grandmother, a former showgirl, also passed from the stage. Whereupon my father sold the Miami home (at a handsome profit) and moved his family to Palm Beach. He had been admitted to the Florida bar and knew exactly how he wanted to live. Had known, as a matter of fact, since his first days as a Yale undergraduate.

The world my father envisioned—and this was years before Ralph Lauren created a fashion empire from the same dream—was one of manor homes, croquet, polo, neatly trimmed gardens, a wine cellar, lots of chintz, worn leather and brass everywhere, silver-framed photographs of family members, and cucumber sandwiches at tea.

That was the life he deliberately and painstakingly created for himself and his family in Palm Beach. He was Lord of the Manor, and if this necessitated buying an antique marble fireplace and mantel from a London dealer and having it crated and shipped to Florida at horrendous expense, so be it. He believed in his dream, and he realized it beautifully and completely. Gentility? It was coming out our ears.

That made me not merely a son but a scion. (Lords of the Manor had heirs or scions.) And if I recognized my father’s spurious life-style at an early age, that didn’t prevent me from taking full advantage of the perks it offered.

I recalled a conversation with comrades at Yale Law before I was booted out. We were discussing how sons often followed in the footsteps of their fathers, not only adopting pop’s vocation, but frequently his habits, hobbies, and vices.

“The apple never falls far from the tree,” someone remarked sententiously.

To which someone else added, “And the turd never falls far from the bird.”

I didn’t wish to brood too deeply on how that latter aphorism might apply to me. But I want you to know that I was aware of what I considered my father’s masquerade. And although I might regard it with lofty scorn, I was willing to profit from it. Perhaps I was as much an actor as my father.

I put all these heavy ruminations in a mental deep six and resolutely turned to making suitable entries in my daily journal. To accomplish this, I was forced to don reading glasses. Yes, at the tender age of thirty-six-plus, the peepers had shown evidence of bagging at the knees, and I needed the hornrimmed cheaters for close-up work. Naturally I never wore them in public. One doesn’t wish to wobble about resembling a nuclear physicist, does one?

I made notes regarding the recovery of the Clarence T. Frobisher letters. Then I jotted down what little I had learned from my father regarding the claimed theft of the Inverted Jenny stamps from the wall safe in the bedroom of Lady Cynthia Horowitz. I scrawled a reminder to phone Horowitz and set up an early appointment.

Then, staring at my diary, I made a final note that amazed me. It read as follows:

“Jennifer Towley!!!”

I
OVERSLEPT AND BY
the time I trooped downstairs my father had already left for the office (we usually drove in together), and my mother was pottering about in the potting shed, which seemed logical. I learned all this from Olson, our houseman, who was seated in the kitchen smoking a pipe and working on a mug of black coffee to which he may or may not have added a dram of aquavit. He also told me his wife, Ursi, had taken the station wagon to seek fresh grouper for our dinner that night.

You would think, wouldn’t you, that a man with the red corpuscles of the Vikings dancing through his veins would have a given name of Lars or Sven. But Olson’s first name was Jamie, and it was not a diminutive of James; it was just Jamie. He was a wrinkled codger, about my father’s age, and he and his wife had been with us as long as I could remember. They were childless and both seemed content to go on working at the Chez McNally for as long as they could get out of bed in the morning.

“Eggs?” he asked.

I shook my head. “Rye toast and coffee. I’m dieting.”

He set to work in that slow, deliberate way of his. Both the Olsons were good chefs—good, not great—but neither would ever qualify for a fast-food joint. They didn’t dawdle, they were just unbrisk.

“Jamie,” I said, “do you know Kenneth? He drives for Lady Horowitz.”

“I know him.”

“What’s his last name?”

“Bodin.”

“What kind of a guy is he?”

“Big.”

I sighed. Getting information from Olson isn’t difficult, but it takes time.

“How long has he been with Horowitz—do you know?”

He paused a moment to think. “Mebbe five, six years.”

“That sounds about right,” I said. “A few years ago there was talk going around that he was more than just her chauffeur. You hear anything about that?”

“Uh-huh,” Jamie said. He brought my breakfast and poured himself more coffee.

“You think there was anything to it?” I persisted.

“Mebbe
was,
” he said. “Then. Not now.”

His taciturnity didn’t fool me; he enjoyed gossip as much as I did.

You must understand that Palm Beach is a gossiper’s paradise. It is, in fact, the Gossip Capital of the World. In Palm Beach everyone gossips eagerly and constantly. I mean we
relish
it.

“Is this Kenneth Bodin married?” I pressed on, slathering my toast with the mango jelly Jamie had thoughtfully set out.

“Nope.”

“Girlfriend?”

“Mebbe.”

“Anyone I might know?”

He slowly removed his cold pipe from his dentures and regarded me gravely. “She gives massages,” he said.

“No kidding?” I said, interested. “Well, at the moment I’m not acquainted with any masseuses. She work in West Palm Beach?”

“Did,” Olson said. “Till the cops closed her down.”

“And what is she doing now?”

He was still staring at me. “This and that,” he said.

“All right,” I said hurriedly, “I get the picture. Ask around, will you, and see if you can find out her name and address.”

He nodded.

I finished my breakfast and went into my father’s study to use his directory and phone. The old man puts covers on his telephone directories. Other people do that, of course, but most use clear plastic. My father bound his directories in genuine leather. I mention this merely to illustrate how meticulous he was in his pursuit of gentility.

I looked up the number of Lady Cynthia Horowitz and dialed. Got the housekeeper, identified myself, and asked to speak to the mistress. Instead, as I knew would happen, I was shunted to Consuela Garcia. She was Lady Cynthia’s social secretary and general factotum.

I knew Consuela, who had come over from Havana during the Mariel boatlift. A few years previously she and I had a mad, passionate romance that lasted all of three weeks. Then she discovered that when it comes to wedding bells I am tone-deaf, and she gave me the broom. Fair enough. But we were still friends, I thought, although now when we met at parties and dances, we shook hands instead of sharing a smooch.

“Archy,” she said, “how nice to hear from you.”

“How are you, Connie?”

“Very well, thank you.”

“I saw you out at Wellington last Saturday,” I told her. “That was a very handsome lad you were with. Is he new?”

“Not really,” she said, laughing. “He’s been used. What can I do for you, Archy?”

“An audience with Lady C. Half-hour, an hour at the most.”

“What’s it about?”

“Charity subscription,” I said, not knowing if Horowitz had told her of the disappearance of the Inverted Jennies. “We’ve simply
got
to do something to save the hard-nosed gerbils.”

“The
what?
”

“Hard-nosed gerbils. Delightful little beasties, but they’re dwindling, Connie, definitely dwindling.”

“I don’t know,” she said doubtfully. “Everyone’s been hitting on her lately to help save something or other.”

“Give it a try,” I urged.

She came back on the phone a few moments later. “If you can come over immediately,” she said, sounding surprised, “Lady Cynthia will see you.”

“Thank you, Connie,” I said humbly. I can do humble.

The Miata is not a car whose door you open to enter. As with the old MG, you vault into the driver’s seat as if you were mounting a charger. So I vaulted and headed northward on A1A. Lady Horowitz’s estate was just up the road a piece, as they say in Florida, and traffic was mercifully light, so I could let my charger gallop.

As I drove I mentally reviewed what I knew about the woman I was about to interview.

Her full name was Lady Cynthia Kirschner Gomez Stanescu Smythe DuPey Horowitz. If she was not a clear winner in the Palm Beach marital sweepstakes, she was certainly one of the contenders. Around her swimming pool, in addition to Old Glory, she flew the six flags of her ex-husbands’ native lands. Everyone said it was a sweet touch; the divorce settlements had left her a very wealthy woman indeed.

She had won her title from her last husband, Leopold Horowitz, who had been knighted for a lifetime of research on the mating habits of flying beetles. Unfortunately, a year after being honored, he had fallen to his death from a very tall tree in the Amazon while trying to net a pair of the elusive critters
in flagrante delicto.
His bereaved widow immediately flew to Paris to purchase a black dress (with pouffe) from Christian Lacroix.

Long before I met Lady Cynthia I had heard many people speak of her as a “great beauty.” But when I was finally introduced, it was difficult to conceal my shock. It would be ungentlemanly to call a woman ugly. I shall say only that I found her excessively plain.

While not a crone, exactly, she had a long nose with a droopy tip and a narrow chin that jutted upward. Drooping nose and jutting chin did not touch, of course, but I had this dream that you might clamp a silver dollar vertically between nose and chin tips and, by flicking it with your forefinger, set it a-twirling. I could not understand how old age could so ravage the features of a “great beauty.”

“Why, she must be over eighty,” I remarked to my father.

“Nonsense,” he said, rather stiffly. “She’s a year younger than I.”

I still could not comprehend the “great beauty” legend or how she had been able to snare so many husbands. The mystery was solved when a national tabloid (published in nearby Lantana, incidentally) printed a sensationalized article on Lady Cynthia and her myriad marriages and extracurricular affairs. The article was, as they say, profusely illustrated, and it provided the reason for her allure.

She had been born Cynthia DiLuca in Chicago, daughter of a butcher, and even at an early age it was observed that she had a face that would stop a Timex. But to make up for this, she was blessed with a body so voluptuous that her first published nude photos made every geezer in the world snap his braces.