Mortal Friends (4 page)

“Unfortunately, I do. Social life may look like it’s all jewels and clothes and parties. But actually, it’s helmets, guns, and trenches. Trust me, it’s a war zone.”

“Like life,” he said. “But you gotta know the lies of a world before you can find out the truth.”

“I guess.”

“So…you know what a confidential informant is?”

“A CI? A snitch? Indeed I do,” I said proudly. “My friend Violet Bolton has taught me all the crime slang.”

“Oh, yeah? She interested in crime, is she?”

“Violet? She’s a crime addict. She should have been a detective.”

“That right? Well, I need a snitch—someone who’ll report back to me on all the social stuff going on in Washington. The dirt. Who’s doin’ what, and who’s doin’ who.”

“And you think I can do this?”

“I know you
can
. The question is,
will
you?”

“Sure!”

As thrilled as I was with my ersatz Mata Hari assignment, I confessed that I didn’t think there was a whole lot going on at the moment—that is, no new affairs or social wars I could think of. But Gunner wasn’t deterred. He told me to start with the Symphony Ball, telling him who was there and what the event was like. I gave him a blow-by-blow. Told him about Grant and Violet. Told him about Cynthia and the big donation. Naturally, I mentioned Bob, but I didn’t go into detail, since I hadn’t heard from him since getting those damn roses.

When I finished, Gunner said, “You know a lot more than you think. You’re just used to it all, so a lot of things don’t seem strange to you like they do to me. Think of me as a visitor in a foreign country and yourself as a native. You gotta explain things to me that you take for granted.”

“Yes, but very often visitors see things the natives don’t,” I pointed out.

“Let’s hope.”

When Gunner was getting ready to leave, I joked I was pretty sure I didn’t know any killers, but that there were a few people I wouldn’t mind killing.

“Yeah? Like who, for instance?”

“Like come into my shop on a Saturday afternoon and take your pick.”

He tried to look appreciative, but I knew he didn’t think that was funny, especially under the circumstances.

“I won’t come here again,” he said. “We’ll meet somewhere else. I’ll let you know where. I have your word now, right? No telling anyone about me or that you’re helping me, okay? Trust me, no one likes the police snooping around in their business.”

I’m not sure why Gunner chose me except that I was accessible. I had a shop. He hung around. It was fairly easy for him to get to know me. And besides, I wasn’t really
in
society, but more on the fringe. It was true I knew most of the players and had my picture taken at big events because of the shop and because I had a certain standing, I guess. But it was mainly because a few of the gossip columnists and editors were my pals and my customers. Also, unlike politicians and most socialites, I had nothing to lose by talking to him. So talk I did, without reservation or fear of reprisal.

At the front door, he paused and said: “Remember, Reven, people never expect evil to look like them.”

Woo woo. That sent a creepy chill right down the old spine.

The instant Gunner left, Rosina asked me what we’d been talking about all that time. When I told her, “Antiques,” she just laughed.

G
unner made me swear to keep our relationship a secret—which I did. Swear, I mean. I didn’t keep it to myself. I told Violet. I told Violet everything. Violet told me everything. We were best friends, after all. We gabbed to each other on an almost daily basis, dishing the dirt, no holds barred. Years ago, we made this pact never, ever,
ever, ever
to repeat any of the stuff we told each other. If half of what we said to each other ever got out, there would have been a lot more murders in Georgetown.

Her reaction was predictable. She said, “If he wants to know about Washington society, how come he didn’t ask
me
?”

It’s true that Violet was a much bigger deal in town than I was. It was also true that she would have given her eyeteeth to be a detective’s confidential informant, particularly one who was working on a serial killer case. I knew the implied superiority in her comment was unintended. However, it was moments like this that reminded me of how much things had changed since Violet and I first met.

I’d known Violet Bolton—Violet McCloud, as she was called then—since our days at Wheelock Academy, one of the last of the “all girls” schools in the country, located just outside of Providence, Rhode Island. Wheelock was not a great school by any standard. My father compared it to an odd-lot house on Wall Street, because it was known for accepting troubled or less than stellar students. To be honest, my grades never reflected what I think of as my intelligence. I was always more creative than analytical. Wheelock was the only boarding school I could get into at the time.

Violet was my roommate for three grueling years in that gilded detention center. I couldn’t help but feel great loyalty to my companion in adolescence, a grim, unsteady, and altogether miserable phase of life. We were all of us in a chrysalis, waiting to take flight. I was a butterfly. Violet was a moth.

I was a star back then, if I do say so myself. The fact that I was the only girl from New York didn’t hurt. It meant that I enjoyed a certain celebrity among my peers right off the bat. They thought I was more sophisticated. I was—at least, I convinced them that I was. Sophistication was a language I claimed to speak with absolute fluency. And who could dispute me? It was rather like saying: “I’m an expert on Chinese poetry of the tenth century,
and you prove I’m not!
” I dropped all these sophisticated New York names, and the girls loved it because New York was this big, shimmering Oz of a city they were all dying to go to and to which I actually belonged.

Not only that, I had all the accoutrements of sophistication: my very own gold Dupont lighter (which I’d filched from my mother), fashionable clothes, purchased from the best New York department stores, and loads and loads of pretentious conversation that no one at Wheelock dared challenge. I wasn’t nearly as secure or informed as I made out, but my classmates didn’t seem to notice. Some of those girls were so provincial they didn’t even know what an astringent was. I told them flatly: “
I’m
an astringent.”

An adoring clique of girls listened to me night after night as I regaled them with tales of delicious decadence and debauchery in the Big Apple—all the product of my youthful imagination. I was seductive, no question. But I was also very nice to everyone, which is why people liked me. And to be honest, I was gorgeous—a Valkyrie among trolls. Being gorgeous somehow made me a natural leader. Nor did it hurt that boys found me attractive. I was the first girl in my class to be invited on a college weekend—the Harvard-Yale game—by a Harvard senior, no less.

Violet McCloud showed up at Wheelock in our sophomore year. She was from Natick, Massachusetts, a town whose great claim to fame at the time was that it was the home of Tampax. Needless to say, compared to Natick, New York was the clear winner in the cosmopolitan sweepstakes. Violet was a very odd girl, which is probably why they stuck us together as roommates, because I was so popular
and she was such a geek. They thought I’d help her along. And they were right.

Violet was smart as a whip, but clumsy—one of those girls who’s either tripping over her own feet or getting under yours all the time. Her thick mole-colored hair looked as if someone had put a bowl over her head and cut around it. Her face was pudgy and very pale, but her eyes were sharp and blue, like two sapphires stuck in the middle of a tapioca pudding. When she first arrived at school, she was very unhappy and gloomy, and she cried all the time. I called her “my little rain McCloud.” She made no effort to fit in, and our classmates roundly shunned her. I didn’t much like her either at first, and I was pissed off at the school for sticking me with her.

However, I soon discovered that Violet had this wonderfully macabre sense of humor, which I really appreciated, even if others didn’t. She had honed the art of amusingly gruesome conversation, and she could really make me laugh. Despite her flaccid appearance, she was sharp as a tack, and she never missed a trick. I learned that her quirky personality had a lot to do with all her problems at home. She told me her father had left her mom for a gym teacher half his age who worked in the local high school. Violet was wounded and mortified by the whole situation, which is why she never invited anyone home with her on vacations and also why she hated to go home herself.

God help me, I always love an underdog, so I insisted she be included in the cool group of girls, of which I, of course, was the undisputed leader. Everyone understood that if you were mean to Violet, you had to deal with me.

Throughout our three years at Wheelock, Violet and I became inseparable. People would see us walking together and say, “There goes Reven and her handmaiden.” We looked like a champagne flute and a Toby jug. Then I went off to the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design to study art and interior design. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do, but I knew it would definitely be something creative and probably earth-shattering. Violet applied to five colleges but only got into one: DePaul University in Chicago. The day of our graduation from Wheelock, I think it’s safe to say that there was no doubt in anyone’s mind, including my own, that I would sail through life and Violet would sink like a stone.

But something happened. Or didn’t happen, as the case may be.
With so many possibilities open to me, I found it hard to choose one particular path or one particular person—if you don’t count my brief marriage to a painter, which ended in a quick divorce. Just when I got a foothold somewhere, I balked, thinking something or someone better would come along. I drifted along under the mistaken impression that my youth and beauty would never end, and that I would succeed in life just because everyone said I would. I felt entitled to great things, whereas Violet was always astonished when anything good happened to her. She beavered away, one step at a time, forging a path that was actually leading somewhere. I was just going with the flow, as we used to say.

Even though we lost touch for a few years after graduation, I always knew what Violet was up to because of the long and detailed entries she sent in to
Passages
, Wheelock’s alumnae bulletin. No one wrote in to our “Class Notes” more frequently than Violet. And no one had more positive news. It was almost as if she wanted to make up for her rank unpopularity by showing everyone there was indeed life after boarding school.

I followed Violet’s career—from her graduation magna cum laude from DePaul University, to the University of Southern California Law School, to her pro bono stint on the Osage Reservation in Oklahoma, to her move to Washington, D.C., as an environmental lobbyist on Capitol Hill, with interest and, I have to say, hefty amounts of incredulity. I never thought that Violet, a moody, mousy girl, had it in her to do so unbelievably well—and honestly, much better than yours truly.

I was the one who had a series of unsuccessful careers tethered to a string of ghastly boyfriends and one brief marriage, while Violet not only distinguished herself on the work front but managed to snag Thomas Grant Bolton Jr., the handsome and wealthy heir to the Potomac Bank, thus becoming a young grande dame of Washington. The irony was that I actually introduced her to Grant, who was an old beau of mine. Violet now had a family and a settled life, while I was divorced and childless. My biological clock, once ticking like a time bomb, lay unexploded in the dust of failed relationships. Go figure.

I like to think that I haven’t changed all that much since our school days. I’m still a tall, willowy clotheshorse with long legs, an ample bust, and a luxurious fizz of golden hair. (Okay, I dye it.) But Violet is vastly improved. When she first came to Washington and looked
me up, I almost didn’t recognize her. She’d completely transformed herself from the pudgy, mousy girl I’d defended all through boarding school. She was actually good-looking, if a tad overdone for D.C. She’d lost weight and made the most of her body through exercise. Her sharp sapphire eyes were no longer mired in a pudding face, but the most striking feature of a slim and very attractive woman. Plus, her quirky personality lent a certain charm to her face, so that the more you got to know her, the better looking she became.

Though Violet was working as an environmental lobbyist, she didn’t know many people. I introduced her to my friends. After she met Grant, she was desperate to fit in. Her clothes left a lot to be desired. She had this one brown suit with green flecks in it that made her look like a diseased tree frog. I introduced her to Lisa, a personal shopper at Saks, who refined her look. I also took her to Ury’s Hair Salon, where Sara, a great stylist, reshaped and colored her hair. Violet adapted to her surroundings with astonishing speed and compliance. She was a quick study. I watched her assemble her new image, piece by piece, imitating the style of people she admired and taking the advice of those she respected—mainly me. I had her looking like an appropriately elegant Washingtonian in a matter of weeks.

Still, the ongoing mystery to me, of course, was how Violet had done so well for herself while all my natural looks and sparkle had failed to secure me a better perch in life. It slightly irritated me when she went on and on about Grant and what a wonderful husband he was. I sometimes wondered if I hadn’t made the biggest mistake of my life by not grabbing him for myself when I had the chance. But Grant just wasn’t my type.

I’d grown up around boys like Grant Bolton Jr.—stiff scions of privilege who felt burdened by their wealth and were constantly trying to overcome the improbable hardship of too many advantages. He was a workaholic even way back then, desperate to prove himself on his own and show the world he wasn’t simply another rich man’s son, but a contender in his own right. Grant was too boring for me in those days, too much of a WASP, too uptight, and too repressed. I was looking for someone much more exciting and interesting, an uninhibited lover with a wild sense of adventure and a streak of glamour—a shit, in other words.

I could hardly believe it when Violet and Grant fell in love, even
though I was the one who fixed them up. It was the most tepid, uninteresting courtship you could ever imagine. The only real sparks came from Violet’s determination to get Grant. I was there. I saw that steely one-track mind of hers steaming toward him like smokestack lightning.

You want my honest opinion? I believe the main reason Grant married Violet when he could have had his pick of artful beauties was because she was simply so determined to get him. I watched her tailor herself to fit his needs as well as the needs of his family. I marveled at how quickly she understood that Grant wanted a wife who would not outshine him as his heritage had always done, but who would also complement that heritage by fitting neatly into the Bolton clan and advancing its interests. Knowing how much Grant valued his parents’ opinion, Violet also courted them almost as skillfully as she courted Grant—particularly his mother, Lorraine “Rainy” Bolton. Grant always wanted to please his parents, daunting as that task often was.

The fact that Rainy Bolton liked Violet right off the bat was a huge plus. Rainy considered herself an infallible judge of character. She was renowned for her snap judgments about people. Her word was law to Grant, who once said to me, in all seriousness, “Mother can’t admit she’s wrong, therefore she never is.”

Violet knew how to be deferential without appearing sycophantic. Rainy loved it that Violet was so community spirited, yet she didn’t put herself forward in any way. In Rainy’s eyes, it was important for her son to marry a substantial person, but definitely not “a show horse,” as Rainy termed people who flaunted their accomplishments. Rainy was the star of the Bolton family, and she was determined to remain so. Rainy didn’t like me on sight, and she immediately took to Violet. Grant, eager to please his mother, took to Violet too. His mother’s approval may have been the decisive factor in his decision to marry her.

Back in the day, I never could have imagined that my handmaiden in boarding school would become my queen in real life. Our roles had totally reversed. I sometimes think that had fate been kinder, or had I been less picky, I, not Violet, would be Mrs. Grant Bolton now. But fate had other plans for me, and as my divorce lawyer used to say, “You must start from where you are, not from where you wish you could be.” And right now, I was in debt and hoping for a phone call from a man I knew to be Lothario incarnate. Not the greatest place in the world—but not the worst.