Never Too Rich (70 page)

“
Why?” Edwina asked. “Why were you
after us, Leo? Why did you want to kill us?”

“
Leo . . . did not . . . kill. Leo
. . . loved. It . . . was . . .
Miss
Bitch.”
His
voice was weakening even more. “It was Miss Bitch!” he repeated,
and shut his eyes wearily.

“
What are you saying?” Edwina
demanded. “I don’t understand!”

“
Oh, God,” Billie Dawn whispered,
and she looked at Edwina. “Oh, God!”

Suddenly his eyes popped open, and for a moment the
crazy light was back in them, gleaming insanely at Billie Dawn.
With one last massive effort he reached up, grabbed at Billie
Dawn’s hair, and pulled. “Mine . . . !” he rasped.
“Mine!”

Billie screamed and jerked her head back.

Then his eyes dimmed and his hand let go.

Miss Bitch was dead.

There were shouts from the hall now: “Billie!
Billie!”
And racing footsteps. “Billie! Eds!
Hal—”

Then Duncan Cooper burst into the room.

And as if on cue, the night outside the windows
suddenly glared with a dazzling white floodlight and the air was
filled with the clattering roar of a landing helicopter.

By the time they got downstairs, R.L. had arrived
also.

It was over.

Chapter 75

May 29 was a day for funerals.

Three of them took place—one in the morning, one at
noon, and one in the afternoon.

Leo Flood was laid to rest in the morning. He was
buried quietly in a cemetery in Connecticut, with only Edwina and
Hallelujah in attendance.

R.L. waited in the limousine with Leslie. “It may
not be nice to speak ill of the dead,” he’d growled, “but I’d
gladly roast in hell before I’d stand at that bastard’s
graveside.”

Edwina didn’t argue. She couldn’t blame him for the
way he felt. Leo had been a butcher—and had been in the process of
attacking Hallelujah when she’d killed him.

The irony of Leo’s split personality was not lost on
her.

The part of him that was Leo Flood had taken him to
the pinnacle of wealth and power, while the part of him that was
“Miss Bitch” had plunged him into the depths of hell itself.

Neither of Leo’s two business partners, nor the
battalion of executives, nor any of the hundreds of employees of
Beck, Flood, and Kronin, Inc., put in an appearance, figuring it
impolitic to do so. A massive restructuring within the company
would be taking place, and no one wanted to go on record as having
been seen mourning a monster.

After the coffin was lowered, they all rode back
into the city— heading straight for Frank Campbell’s on Madison
Avenue and another funeral.

Services for Anouk were held at noon.

The coffin was open—a testament to the skill and
artistry of the morticians.

Nevertheless, there were a few complaints.

“
Anouk never wore that much
makeup,” intoned Lydia Claussen Zehme, the very picture of elegant
mourning in black silk, a black platter of a straw hat, and long
black kid leather gloves—exactly the kind of outfit Anouk herself
would have worn.

“
And her hairstyle and color are
not quite right either,” Dafydd Cumberland added.

It had not occurred to anyone to get Wilhelm,
Anouk’s hairdresser, to style and color the wig she would wear to
her grave.

Needless to say, all of society had turned out for
Anouk’s sendoff. And of course, nobody had a nasty word to say
about her. Not even Liz Schreck or Klas Claussen.

A stranger listening to the eulogies would have
thought she was Mother Teresa.

Everybody there knew better.

Attending two funerals in one day tends to make one
all too aware of the fragility, preciousness, and shortness of
life.

Throughout Anouk’s eulogies, Edwina kept looking at
R.L. and holding his hand tightly.

Edwina G. Robinson Sbacklebury.
Silently she
tested the sound of it on her lips.

Much too big a mouthful, she decided.

Edwina G. Sbacklebury.

Hmmmm. Now, that did not sound all that bad. In
fact, she rather liked it.

She leaned into R.L.’s ear. “I want to marry you,”
she whispered while Dafydd Cumberland was recounting an anecdote
about Anouk as only he could.

“
What?” R.L.’s head swiveled around
and his mouth dropped open. “Are you serious?”

Edwina nodded eagerly.

“
What I just can’t understand,” he
asked, “is why
now?
Why couldn’t you make up your goddamn
mind a long time ago? You could have saved us both a lot of
heartache.”

“
Because,” Edwina said, “I hadn’t
learned yet.”

“
Learned what?”

“
That life’s too short for us to
waste another goddamn day, that’s what!”

The third funeral was in the afternoon and it was an
East Village event. Needless to say, none of the mourners from
Campbell’s journeyed downtown for this one—especially not Billie
Dawn. Wild horses couldn’t have dragged her there.

It was the Satan’s Warriors’ big send-off for Snake.
He was going with full biker’s honors to that great big Harley
dealer in the sky.

Satan’s Warriors, three hundred strong, had ridden
into New York from as far away as Jacksonville, Florida, to pay
their last respects to a fallen “bro.”

There was the usual roughhousing. A few fights broke
out. A little blood was spilled. There were two or three bad acid
trips. Nothing out of the ordinary.

In the late afternoon, the block shook and rumbled
as the hundreds of Harleys were fired up. Then, riding two abreast,
the New York chapter of the Satan’s Warriors led the parade to the
cemetery— following a police sedan that prudently cleared the
streets. A modified Harley hog, converted into a three-wheeled
trike, pulled Snake’s coffin. The various out-of-town chapters
brought up the rear.

The roar of the bikes could be heard for over half a
mile. It was a sight not often seen in Manhattan.

The funeral procession truly stopped traffic.

Of the three funerals held that day, Snake’s was by
far the largest and most memorable.

^Epilogue

Because of the necessary cleanup—and to a lesser
degree out of respect for the dead—the black-tie gala for the
Southampton Decorator Showcase Showhouse was postponed until the
fourth of July. The doors were thrown open to the public on the
following day.

By then there was no evidence of the slaughter that
had taken place. Once again, every room was in a state of
perfection. Luckily, the damage that had been wrought was covered
by all the individual designers’ mandatory insurance policies.

Never had a showhouse generated such interest.

Thanks to the relentless newspaper and television
coverage, the murder of Anouk de Riscal—New York’s undisputed
social queen— and the famous Wall Street whiz who had terrorized
the modeling world, that year’s Southampton Showhouse was the most
successful in interior-design history.

Everyone was simply dying to see the crime scene of
the year.

Hundreds of thousands of morbid curiosity seekers
converged on Southampton and trooped through the showhouse, each
paying ten dollars for the privilege.

The beautiful rooms went almost unnoticed. It was
the crime scene that attracted and fascinated.

By the time the rooms were dismantled, an
unprecedented two million dollars had been raised for Children with
AIDS—1.6 million more than had originally been anticipated, proving
that in a few rare instances, crime not only pays but also, in even
rarer instances, pays for a good cause.

Billie Dawn and Duncan Cooper didn’t get married,
but they lived happily ever after. They sparked a powerful kind of
magic in each other that grew more and more potent as time went by.
Everything they did seemed to turn to gold.

One day Billie mentioned in passing that studio
lights left her skin rough and dry, while exposure to the elements
during outdoor shoots left it chapped.

Without telling her, Duncan locked himself into the
clinic’s lab and surprised her by coming up with a fabulous
moisturizing lotion. Needless to say he’d developed it without
testing it out on animals, but used the latest test-tube technology
instead. Billie was delighted.

Another time, Billie mentioned that her skin felt
flaccid in the morning.

Duncan came up with—what else?—an antiaging
overnight cream that left her skin feeling brand new and tight.

Before long he had gone on to develop a whole line
of skin-care products especially for her, and one day, when Billie
noticed how extensive her range of personal skin-care aids had
become, she mentioned to Duncan that he might consider marketing
them.

He said he would, but only if she agreed to
advertise them.

She said she would, and they went ahead with it.

The line proved so wildly successful that before
long a Cooper Clinic Skin-Care Boutique occupied a prime sales spot
on the first floor of every major department store in the country.
Before long, the company went public on the New York Stock
Exchange—to the tune of a quarter of a billion dollars.

Perhaps to make up for Billie Dawn’s years of
suffering, fate smiled and smiled and kept on smiling.

Thanks to a new surgical procedure, the damage
Billie’s reproductive organs had sustained during the Satan’s
Warriors’ gang rape turned out to be reparable. In no time at all
she became pregnant— and nine months later delivered strapping twin
boys.

Billie knew where her priorities lay: motherhood
came before career. She took a full year off from modeling, and
then worked only whenever she truly felt like it.

Naturally, such is the nature of supply and demand
that her reduced schedule only made her all the more
sought-after—and expensive.

The money just kept rolling in.

Edwina G. Robinson was on top of the world.

The showhouse hadn’t been the only thing to benefit
from the newspaper and television coverage of Leo’s killing spree
and subsequent death. As the woman who’d pulled the trigger,
thereby ridding the city of its most notorious psychopath—not to
mention saving the life of her daughter
and
supermodel
Billie Dawn in the process—she became an instant celebrity. Her
picture appeared in every newspaper and magazine and on every
television screen in the country. At first she fretted that all the
publicity about her would hurt Edwina G. sales, since it was, in
effect, negative publicity and she, after all, was an admitted
killer.

But William Peters, her press agent, was in seventh
heaven. He crowed that the kind of exposure she was getting
couldn’t have been bought at any price. And of course he was right.
She was invited to be a guest on Donahue and Oprah both, and she
agreed to go on—but only if she could return two weeks later to
present on-air Edwina G. fashion shows. The producers of both shows
agreed with alacrity.

She also fretted about the future of Edwina G.,
since she had been partners with Leo Flood.

Once again, she needn’t have worried. The fallout
was minimal and easily contained, since she hadn’t signed a
contract with Leo personally, but with his company, Beck, Flood,
and Kronin, Inc. Her contract with them was still valid, the
corporation survived, and the new directors of the company, Saul
Beck and David Kronin, made only one major change when they took
over the leadership of the parent firm—they dropped the “Flood” in
its name.

The Edwina G. “fast-fashion” boutiques were a
runaway success, and her designs became the latest fad, putting
Swatch and Reebok to shame. Within a year the company was doing
three hundred million dollars in sales.

But before that happened, Edwina and R.L. officially
tied the knot. It was a quiet wedding, with only a few close
friends and Hal and Leslie in attendance. The bride wore Edwina G.
and kept her maiden name.

With marriage came a change in their living
arrangements. Edwina promptly put the San Remo co-op on the market,
and R.L. sold his half-a-town house. Together they went house
hunting—and since only the sky was the limit, they decided to have
their cake and eat it too. They bought a double-width town house on
the same block as the Cooper Clinic. It had a garage, an indoor lap
pool, and a huge double-height ballroom.

Edwina put dibs on the ballroom and immediately
transformed it into an at-home office.

Within a year she branched out and designed a
complete menswear line. It sold like hotcakes. Next she took to
designing bed sheets and an entire line of home furnishings as
well.

Just like Ralph Lauren.

Hallelujah Cooper had no problems dealing with a
famous mother, a famous father, and a famous common-law
“stepmother” of sorts. Especially since, just as Olympia had
predicted, she went on to become the newest sensation to hit the
modeling scene since Brooke Shields. Despite her bizarre style, her
young freshness appealed.

Before long, the disarming face with the punk hairdo
appeared on all the major magazine covers on both sides of the
Atlantic. Hallelujah was asking—and receiving—an annual six-figure
income. And that was by working only part-time.

If Hallelujah had two complaints, they were that she
had to schedule all her modeling assignments around her school
hours and that Edwina insisted that the income she earned stay in
her trust fund. “You might need it in the years to come, kiddo,”
her mother kept warning her. “You never know . . .”

However, Hallelujah had absolutely no complaints
about her mother’s marriage to R.L. or her father’s relationship
with Billie Dawn. She loved both families equally, and shuttled,
blissful with happiness, between them. She adored the Cooper twins
and genuinely liked having Leslie Shacklebury as a brother.