Too Much Money (6 page)

“You’ve got to be practical, Ruby,” said Maisie. “You’re in quite a different position in New York now than you were before Elias went to prison for seven years. The buildings you want to live in don’t want someone with a prison record to blacken their exclusivity. I don’t care who you know on the board, the boards on those buildings are not going to accept you, and it’ll be all over town that you got turned down and then it’ll be in Toby Tilden’s column in the
Post
that you’ve been blackballed by the ten best buildings on the Upper East Side. That’s not going to be a good start for your return to New York.”

Ruby turned red. It embarrassed her to hear this, but she knew that it was true.

Maisie knew what she was talking about. Several months earlier she had taken it upon herself to meet with Lil Altemus, who was still the president of the board of her Fifth Avenue apartment house. She had only to speak the name Renthal to get a negative reaction.

“Never!”
said Lil Altemus firmly. “Never, never, never. That man has been in prison.”

“But isn’t it true that you are leaving the building, Lil?” Maisie asked.

“If you must know, yes,” replied Lil, rolling her eyes. “I am being downsized by my nephew, who handles my money now that my brother, Laurance, is incapacitated by his stroke. But be that as it may, I am still the president of the board and will be so until I leave. Further, I can assure you that my successor and friend Binkie Bosworth will give you the same answer.”

“What if Elias Renthal were willing to buy your own apartment for five million more than what you are asking?” suggested Maisie.

“I wouldn’t sell it to him in the first place, and I really do need the money,” said Lil. Maisie liked her honesty. Not many people in Lil’s kind of life would admit that they were broke, she thought.

“And in the second place, Elias Renthal would be turned down by Binkie Bosworth and the whole board.”

Maisie treaded lightly.

“Elias Renthal has served his time,” she stated gently. “From what I gather, he was a model prisoner, admired by both the guards and the prisoners.”

“Good for him. Hurrah! Hurrah! Applause, applause,” said Lil, clapping her hands in fake praise. “I will
never
forget that my father died in the Renthals’ house on the night of their ridiculous butterfly ball, and he laid my father, Laurance Van Degan, one of the most important and distinguished men in the city of New York, on the pool table and locked the door so that
it wouldn’t ruin his two-million-dollar party. Let’s talk about something else, Maisie.”

Maisie, who was known to be expert in selling problematic rich people to buildings with difficult boards, knew when she was beaten.

“L
ISTEN
, R
UBY
, it’s better that you hear this from me, an old friend of yours and Elias’s, rather than from some hoity-toity society lady who’s dabbling in real estate and will tell the girls at lunch at Swifty’s that you turned red when you heard you wouldn’t be found acceptable in any of the buildings you wanted to live in. I heard it directly from Lil Altemus, who was the head of her board.”

“Lil Altemus!” cried Ruby, with contempt in her voice. “Who cares what her opinion is anymore? I saw her standing in line for the Madison Avenue
bus
the other day.”

“Lil’s a terrible snob, I know, but she’s old school and she once mattered a great deal in New York. She’s going through bad times,” said Maisie. “I’ve always been fond of Lil.”

“Hmm,” replied Ruby. She couldn’t wait to get even with that broke bitch for blackballing her and Elias.

“Who’s the new head of the board now that Lil can’t afford to live there anymore?”

“Binkie Bosworth, and she thinks the same way that Lil does,” said Maisie.

“It’s not prison-prison, you know, where Elias is in Las Vegas. There are no bars on the windows. He has a little room, not a cell, and he has his own television, and all the latest DVDs, and he gets the
New York Times
, and the
Wall Street Journal
, and the
New York Post
every day, and he never misses reading Kit Jones’s and Dolores De Longpre’s columns. I mean, there are no killers or rapists there, or anyone like that,” said Ruby.

“It’s still prison, Ruby,” said Maisie in a matter-of-fact manner.
“Elias will have done seven years by the time he gets out. Having been in prison for seven years is going to be the first line of his obituary when he dies no matter what amount of good works he intends to do when he is released. Prison is part of your life now, for the rest of your life. He’ll never be in a room where someone’s not going to ask him about it, or, worse, whisper about it to other people while he’s there. No one’s going to forget it, so deal with it, make it work for you.”

“So what are you suggesting?” asked Ruby.

“The kind of building on Fifth or Park that
will
take you is not the kind of building you want to live in,” said Maisie. “Am I right?”

Ruby nodded agreement without vocalizing it. She was still beautiful, Maisie thought, watching her. More mature. She had learned about style from Ezzie Fenwick in the years when she and Elias had been in society. Ezzie had taught her how to dress, and she always had been a quick study. She had never actually been a manicurist in Cleveland, as the article in
W
said about her when she was riding high. She had been a stewardess on American Airlines and later on private jets, which was where she had met Elias. Maisie looked to see if there had been any “work” done on her face during the years she had dropped out of sight in New York when Elias was in prison, but she couldn’t spot any. Her red hair was smartly cut.

“I love your haircut,” said Maisie. “That’s either Kenneth or Frédéric.”

“No, it’s Bernardo. He’s so sweet, Bernardo. He takes me at seven in the morning, before the salon opens, so I don’t have to worry about running into any of the people I used to know.”

“I see you’re still partial to Chanel,” said Maisie, looking at Ruby’s understated suit.

“That prick Ezzie Fenwick turned me on to Chanel,” said Ruby. “Ezzie was fine when we were riding high and we let him
borrow the Rolls and driver, or let him use the apartment in London when we weren’t there, but after all the troubles came, I never heard from him again, and he said some terrible things about us that were repeated back to us. I realize now, after Gus Bailey’s lawsuit for slander, that I could have sued Ezzie for slander.”

“Ezzie died,” said Maisie.

“I was happy to hear there was only a small turnout at his funeral,” said Ruby. “That’s the kind of bitch I’ve turned into. Even Pauline Mendelson didn’t go, I heard. Nor the former first lady.”

Maisie laughed. “The one you have to get to know when you start going about again is Addison Kent. He’s much nicer than Ezzie ever was, and a better dancer, a better bridge player, and he’s just under thirty.”

“Hold on there, Maisie. I have to get used to living with my husband again before I start thinking about a walker taking me to charity balls,” said Ruby.

“Let’s get back to the Tavistock mansion,” said Maisie.

“Are you really talking about that filthy dump with the boarded-up windows?” asked Ruby, clearly disappointed.

“That filthy dump with the boarded-up windows happens to be one of the most beautiful houses in New York underneath the grime. It also happens to be the widest private house in the East Seventies. It’s the width of three brownstones,” said Maisie. “You could turn the ballroom into a projection room and show movies on Sunday nights after people come in from the country. Between your plane and your projection room, you’ll be back in no time.”

Maisie never pushed too hard when she was selling. She wanted the client to think the idea had been hers. “How about if you and I go through the house together? There’s an old caretaker living there. I’ll make the arrangements with him. We’ll go through the service door on the side, and no one will see us.”

“Didn’t somebody’s cook jump out the window of that house?” asked Ruby.

“That cook was nuts, absolutely nuts,” said Maisie. “Ask Gus Bailey about that cook who jumped out the window. He mentioned her in one of his columns in
Park Avenue
. She was nuts.”

“We don’t speak to Gus Bailey,” said Ruby, shaking her head.

“Who’s we?” asked Maisie.

“Elias and I. Not that Elias has any chance of not speaking to him from the federal facility in Las Vegas, but he wouldn’t speak to him if he did have the chance. We hear Gus Bailey is doing ‘The Elias Renthal Story’ on his television series about crime among the rich.”

“Gus is a friend of mine,” said Maisie. “I go way back with Gus. I knew Gus when he first married Peach.”

“Gus Bailey said that he thought Elias was guilty when he wrote about the case in
Park Avenue
, after he came to lunch and dinner at our house,” replied Ruby.

Maisie looked away. She also thought Elias had been guilty. So did everyone in New York. Ruby knew in her heart that Elias had been guilty, too, but she had gone along with Elias’s insistence for the last seven years that he had been innocent of the financial malfeasance with which he had been charged.

“When shall we look at that house?” asked Ruby.

G
US
B
AILEY WAS OFTEN STOPPED IN THE STREET
or in restaurants by people who recognized him from his appearances on the
Harry Sovereign Show
, or as host of his own television show,
Augustus Bailey Presents
. Mostly they were interested in hearing if there was anything new on the Konstantin Zacharias case. He told his friends and his editors that he felt like a magnet for people with some sort of information on that story. Several times men said things like, “I was a friend of Konstantin Zacharias’s. Konstantin wanted to tell me something, but Perla wouldn’t let me be alone with him.” Gus wrote notes in his green leather notebook from Smythson of Bond Street in London; Stokes Bishop gave him one for Christmas every year.

After all the distress he felt over Kyle Cramden and his expensive lawsuit, the only thing that distracted Gus was his novel. He had been feeling so tired lately and so weighed down by anxiety, but when he was writing, the creative energy made him feel renewed. It was a refuge for him. He found himself thinking about it most of the time.

Gus stopped on Madison Avenue and Eighty-first Street in front of the Grant P. Trumbull Funeral Home, the most prestigious mortuary in New York City, to make a note about Perla
Zacharias’s having been seated next to the secretary of state the previous night at a Washington dinner in honor of a former first lady. He wrote that he was astounded that such a universally disliked person had been seated so importantly.

Looking up for a moment, Gus noticed that a green Nissan Sentra, the same one he’d seen parked there earlier, had a driver in it who seemed to be staring at him. But before he could react, out of the corner of his eye, he saw Winkie Williams, the popular society walker, slowly exiting the funeral home, looking left, then right, before turning left in the direction of his apartment.

Winkie Williams had been an extra man on the New York social scene for decades. Every hostess in New York wanted Winkie Williams at her table. “Winkie Williams told me the
most
hilarious story last night about the Duchess of Windsor being a hermaphrodite,” said Ormolu Webb after one of her dinners. He was a particular favorite of Lil Altemus, who doted on him and never gave a party without him, before her lifestyle had become so reduced. “He adds so much to the table,” Lil said to a reporter from
Quest
, who was writing an article on Winkie’s lunch parties. “He’s such fun, such a good dancer, such a good bridge player, he gives charming lunches in that tiny apartment of his. Everybody loves Winkie. You’d never know he was ninety in a million years. Ninety’s the new sixty, he always says.”

“Winkie,” called out Gus, quickly scribbling something down before closing his notebook and tucking it into the inside pocket of his jacket. He noticed that Winkie, who was
over
ninety, had suddenly begun to look very old, after having frequently been described as sprightly and full of fun for the past few decades. Winkie seemed nervous at meeting Gus.

“What scandalous thing are you writing in that famous green leather notebook of yours on the corner of Madison and Eighty-first Street?” asked Winkie, who was adept at social conversation, so as to forestall any questioning.

“Actually, I was just jotting down the license number of that
green Nissan Sentra, with the big guy in dark glasses staring at me. Do you see him? I think the guy is following me or trying to freak me out. The doorman in my apartment building told me yesterday he thought I was being followed by a tall man in a green Nissan Sentra, and here he is.”

“Oh, heavens! You don’t suppose Perla Zacharias is behind the whole thing, do you? You’re not her favorite writer,” said Winkie, his eyes twinkling as he teased Gus flirtatiously.

Gus laughed. Winkie took a gold cigarette case out of his suit pocket. He offered a cigarette to Gus, who declined it.

“Haven’t smoked for years,” said Gus. “But I sure do like that gold cigarette case. I haven’t seen a gold cigarette case since people stopped smoking.”

“Cole Porter gave it to me,” said Winkie. “It has the lyrics of ‘The Extra Man’ engraved inside. I’m leaving it to the Costume Institute at the Met.”

“That’s a treasure. By the way, who died?” Gus said, pointing his head toward the door of the funeral home.

“What do you mean?” asked Winkie.

“I can’t imagine anyone going into Grant P. Trumbull unless he was visiting a corpse.”

“Oh, I just had a sudden urge to pee,” he said quickly. Then, changing the subject, he said “Gus, I can’t get enough of the Zacharias story, and now I hear a hush-hush rumor that you’re working on a novel about it. How exciting! I visited several times at their villa in Biarritz that used to belong to Empress Eugénie of France. I’ve never seen such luxury. I don’t believe word has reached Perla yet, but I don’t envy you when it does. She thinks that what you have written about her in
Park Avenue
is what’s really keeping her from making it in New York society. She’d love to be the next Adele Harcourt, you know. And speaking of society, I thought you’d be at Lil Altemus’s first dinner party in her new apartment last night.”