The Last Guest

by Tess Little

  Another mourner had joined me on the mezzanine, so I hung back to watch him descend. A young man in sunglasses, carrying a matte-black box tied with a thick white ribbon. Were we supposed to bring gifts to this party? A few moments later, I watched him below, weaving his way to the far corner—and then I saw what he was heading toward.

  A floral shrine, a tower of black boxes bursting with the delicate, the colorful, the blooming. I wondered whether this cornucopia had been detailed in Richard’s notes and suggested in guests’ invitations or whether, simply, bouquets were obsolete in the industry these days. The young man removed his sunglasses.

  It was Charlie, pink eyes and only half himself. He had shaved his head. He was gaunt, spectral. Was it guilt or grief that haunted him?

  Charlie untied the ribbon, then lifted the lid. Nearly fifty white chrysanthemums were lined up inside. He removed a box at the front of the table, hid it on the floor. Then placed his own center stage. Took the phone from his breast pocket. Snapped a photo. Moved swiftly on. Another mourner was approaching, with yet another box.

  It was time to descend. As I picked my way down the spiral staircase, I heard an elderly Bryant inquire about the tank.

  “Ah yes, the invisible exhibition,” Tommo replied. “Richard wanted to display a cubic foot of air from every country he visited during filming.”

  “How marvelous,” exclaimed the lady.

  I giggled, in spite of myself.

  “I’ve given different stories to each Aunt Edna,” he whispered, hugging me tight. “I told one it was waiting for a Hirst and another that Richard wanted to display himself like Bentham.”

  I laughed again, stopping when I noticed the surrounding English stares.

  It was good to see Tommo. Something about him—perhaps the familiarity of his smile, his earnest eyes—was unchanged by that night, untainted. He was tired, yes, a little harrowed, but still himself. Still Richard’s Tommo. He couldn’t have killed his best friend, could he? I watched his face for any nervousness, any hint of a lie.

  “Do you think,” I said quietly, “we should be talking?”

  “More suspicious if we don’t, isn’t it?” he muttered. “But let’s not dwell on the subject.” He thrust his hands into his pockets, raised his voice. “So, here we are. It doesn’t seem real, does it?”

  “These things never do,” I answered.

  “Naturally, a memorial organized by Dicky would have a surreal air to it,” he said. “But some of these guests are quite incredible.”

  “It’s the party of the month.”

  “And Dicky wouldn’t have settled for anything less.” Tommo looked around. “Lillie’s giving a speech, then, is she?”

  “It’ll be lovely if her line-learning is anything to go by—she’s been reciting it all week.”

  “Good sport,” Tommo said, watching her. “Like father, like daughter.”

  Lillie and Honey were still together, moving from group to group like polite newlyweds. I saw the way Richard’s lemon-lipped relatives recoiled as their darling’s brazenly beautiful partner walked among them. Lillie rested her head on his shoulder every now and then, territorial.

  I tried to quell my jealousy. Tried to pry my mind away from everything I had done, before Richard’s death, that had kept Lillie and Honey apart. The silence, the statement to the press. The things I could have said differently; the truths I could have told.

  “Sir, ma’am,” a waiter said, offering a tray of champagne coupes. Was there something familiar about him? “The speeches will begin on the lawn shortly.”

  * * *

  —

  I looked up from the vomit on my dress to where the glass table had stood only seconds before. It was nothing but a metal frame, which the dancers hopped over to escape.

  “Why were you dancing on the table?” I shouted after them. “It was glass.”

  A man on the couch called over the girl in his lap, “Chill out, it’s just a table. They were having fun.”

  “It was an expensive table.” Fury sharpened my tongue. “They shouldn’t have been standing on an expensive. Fucking. Glass. Table.”

  And the shards might not vacuum out of the rug—what if Lillie stepped on one? The underwear man was trailing scarlet footprints across my white-marble floor.

  “Hey.” I tried to get his attention over the thudding dance music. “Hey, you!”

  “Leave him alone,” said the man on the couch. “What’s your problem?”

  “My problem,” I said, crouching to collect glass, careful not to step on the pieces, “is that this fucking idiot just broke my table.”

  “Oh my god.” Glee dawned on his face. “Are you Rich’s wife?”

  I dropped the shards. There was nowhere to put them. The cleaners could deal with it tomorrow; the guests could slice their feet.

  “Fuck.” The man laughed. “I heard he had a wife locked away somewhere.”

  “Don’t be silly.” The woman sitting on him batted his arm. “Isn’t Rich—”

  “Elsie.” Jerry tapped my shoulder. “Elsie, the caterers want to know where to put the cake.”

  Four men were carrying the platter on their shoulders, like pallbearers.

  “We were told the table in here,” one of them said, “but…”

  I looked back to the shattered glass, the empty table frame.

  “I don’t know how much longer I can hold this,” a muffled voice called.

  “Should they take it back to the kitchen?” asked Jerry.

  “No, please.”

  “It’s too heavy to—”

  “Anywhere, I don’t care.” I sighed. “Just put it down anywhere.”

  The men shuffled over to a leather armchair, lowered the cake. Icing smushed on my upholstery; the strawberries would stain.

  “Great party.” Jerry was still beside me.

  “When I agreed to host the birthday party,” I could hear the slurring in my voice, “at the same time as the One Hundred wrap, I didn’t quite think…”

  “It would get out of hand like this?” Jerry laughed. “Can’t remember the last event I went to that wasn’t just quiet schmoozing. Take the compliment, Elsie—it’s a fucking great party. People want to let go.”

  A tall brunette was lifting Jerry’s hand into the air. “Can we dance?”

  He cooed, “One second, I’m talking to a friend.”

  She pouted.

  “Why don’t you dance over there,” he said, “and I’ll watch you from here.”

  “You’re such a voyeur, babe.”

  His eyes followed her—the long legs, the tiny black dress—as she disappeared into the crowd.

  I raised an eyebrow. “Letting go, right, is that what you call it? Isn’t your wife here tonight?”

  Jerry rolled his eyes. “She can go fuck herself as far as I’m concerned.”

  “You two fighting again?”

  “Judy was furious when I said we had to come, because it’s her sister’s birthday. But it’s a work gig, what are we going to do? Miss the wrap party?”

  “And the little black dress?”

  “If my wife wants to ignore me all night,” Jerry said, “let’s see how she likes it when I find company elsewhere. Hey, have you seen her at all?”

  “I don’t think so.” I narrowed my eyes. “Have you seen my husband?”

  Jerry shook his head. Over his shoulder, I could see guests crowding the cake. They ignored the plates and forks that the caterer had placed beside the armchair and were shoving fistfuls into each other’s mouths, sucking cream from fingers.

  “What’s that smell?” Jerry scrunched his nose.

  And then the stench reached my nostrils too. I had forgotten about the vomit seeping through my dress.

  * * *

  —

  I
caught Kei’s eye across the scattered crowd. She was dressed in a suit, black shirt, and tie, the edges of her torso tattoos just about creeping over the collar line. She looked away immediately, squinted into the fierce sun.

  It seemed my thoughts about the other guests were right: There was an unspoken agreement among us eight. The press had still not found a source to detail the guest list of that night. Naturally, none of us had broken our silence, but it was miraculous that none of our friends, relatives, or staff had done so, nor had the caterers from that night. Some of us had been spotted entering the police station with our lawyers, ambushed by paparazzi on the way home, but was it so incredible that the cops would want to speak with Richard’s oldest friends, his ex-wife, colleagues? And others, who had not attended the party, were also interviewed by the police repeatedly, were pictured in the press. I noted, with strange satisfaction, that my name rarely popped up. Richard’s ex-wife would be questioned after his death, yes, but would she have been invited to the most talked-about party in Hollywood? A has-been actress? Don’t be ridiculous.

  And so we birthday guests stayed far from one another at the memorial for the most part, only daring to mingle with guests we had been acquainted with before that fateful night. I noticed Kei clinking her glass against Miguel’s at the toast, Sabine air-kissing Charlie, and I spoke with Jerry when the crowd listening to the speech dissolved to conversations and canapés on trays. Were the others wary, like me? Were they judging one another too?

  But all of us avoided the guests I had spotted paying their respects to Lillie just before her speech: our two police detectives. They watched through the crowds as Jerry began to talk.

  “Great speech, huh?” he said, nudging me from behind. “Would have thought Rich wrote it himself, it was that…”

  “Fastidious?” I offered, resolving to ignore the nameless spies. Their attendance made me feel no safer. It was only another reminder that Richard’s killer was here too. Perhaps in the crowd, perhaps standing right in front of me.

  “You got it.”

  “I think he did write parts of it, actually,” I said. “Richard left notes for Lillie. She’s been locked away in her room for weeks, studying them.”

  “Ha, of course he wrote the speech too. Yeah, I heard about his notes for the day. Classic Rich. Always overprepared.”

  “So I was trying to guess which parts were his. I bet he picked the Auden poem. He always used to talk about that boy falling out of the sky. He recited it to me on our honeymoon, when we were in Paris.”

  I could feel the cops watching as I said, quieter now, “I wanted to call you, Jerry. But my lawyer advised me to keep to myself.”

  “Oh yup,” he said, nodding slowly. “They’ll do that to you.”

  The weeks since Richard’s birthday had deflated Jerry. He was naturally a chubby man, but now the fat had shrunk to wrinkles. Without his trademark chuckle, I would not have recognized him. Even the eyes, the facial expressions, were different. Exhausted, dull. But there was no way of telling how much of this change was due to illness, how much to something more sinister: remorse, shame, the stress of resisting discovery.

  For a moment, though, I quashed my suspicions. This was Jerry, whom I had known for years; the only thing I could be sure of was his illness, his suffering.

  “I want to apologize, Jerry,” I said. His face fell a little, so I lowered my voice further. “That night, I didn’t…I hadn’t heard about your diagnosis or your disagreements with Richard, and I wish I could have called to say—”

  “Cops have loose lips, huh?”

  When I opened my mouth to apologize again, he jumped in. “Look, don’t worry about it. Kinda guessed you didn’t know. And yeah, sure, the cops told you about everything. Heard my fair share of your marital problems.”

  A pang of curiosity in my stomach. The notion had not occurred to me—if I had learned of the other guests’ relationships to Richard, what had they been asked about me? More important, what had they told?

  I remembered that conversation I’d overheard at the party: Jerry and Charlie, whispering in the kitchen about Honey’s allegations. Jerry had been drunk, but he’d meant what he said—these were thoughts that had been festering since the allegations. He believed Richard over everyone else. And so, though he felt like an old friend of mine, I knew: If Jerry had any reason to doubt me, he would not hesitate.

  “It’s funny, you know,” said Jerry, “this reminds me of your wedding.”

  “It’s the relatives, isn’t it? Another transatlantic affair.”

  “The accents, yeah, sure. But also, I don’t know, maybe the feeling that Rich is here.” Jerry looked around him. “Yeah, really reminds me of your wedding. He always did throw the best parties.”

  “He did.” I tried to keep my voice normal, my eye contact steady. But I was studying Jerry’s body language, waiting for a chance to bring up the murder and watch his response.

  There was no need.

  “I know we’re not supposed to be talking about it,” Jerry said, “but don’t you find it strange that we’re all here? I’ve counted every one of us, all eight. And that means the killer’s here too. Can’t believe they haven’t caught him yet. Freaks me out.”

  “Unless it wasn’t one of us,” I said. “The eight.”

  I found myself peering behind Jerry, through the atrium windows to where the empty octopus tank stood. But it was too sunny—I was met only with the blurred reflection of the crowds on the lawn.

  “You think someone else came in the night?” asked Jerry. “Didn’t they rule that out early?”

  I watched his face as he said this—was it a genuine question?

  “Jesus Christ,” he went on, “I really thought Rich would outlive me. Despite his problems. And not that night, with all of us there, it’s…You know, I got him sober four times now. And kept him sober between. I thought he might have been thinking about it again recently, with everything in the press. I just knew—I just knew that those kinds of situations triggered him. And I tried to bring it up over one of our lobster lunches, but it didn’t end well. You know he fired me, right?”

  I nodded. The pictures—so that had been the reason for the punch: Jerry was trying to keep Richard sober and had been fired as a result. Was the punch for the dismissal? Or for something Richard had said?

  “Sure you do. Everyone does now. Well, that’s why. But I think he wanted to reconcile when he heard about the illness, and I thought he would be safer, you know, if I was with him on his birthday. So now I just keep thinking, if I’d been—if I had stayed awake, I could have…But I was so tired, Elsie; I shouldn’t have been there at all.”

  Jerry’s story made sense, but I couldn’t stop thinking about those paparazzi pictures. The man before me seemed so gentle, so concerned about his friend. But that punch had been violent. Blood dripping thick down Richard’s face.

  “Ma’am?” A waitress held out a green bottle.

  “Thank you,” I said. “But only an inch more, please. I’m driving.”

  “Of course,” she said.

  “No thanks, sweetie,” Jerry declined, keeping a hand over the top of his glass. It was full of orange juice.

  When she left, I fell to a whisper again. “Do you recognize that waitress? She was there that night, wasn’t she?”

  “Huh? Oh yeah,” he said. “The blonde, right? Amelia. Great gal. Chatted with her earlier—apparently Richard said in those memorial notes that he wanted the same catering company for this event. And Amelia’s boss doubled the fees because they were already overbooked today. That’s what she told me. Honey paid it anyway. Totally nuts. I find it pretty morbid, you know, planning those details. But that was Rich, wasn’t it? What did you say? Fastidious.”

  I spotted two familiar figures behind Jerry. Yola was approaching Lillie. She swaddled her in a tight embrace. A tall man in an
oversized suit hovered beside them—Yola’s husband? When Yola pulled away, Lillie turned to him, received a kiss on her forehead.

  Jerry noticed my distraction and smiled.

  “Yola’s such an angel,” he said. “She’s been dropping by to see me and Judy at least once a week. I mean, she went through it all with Samuel, so she really gets it. Have you tried her tres leches? No? Oh my god, it’s heavenly. I always say to her, I always say: Yola, if it gets to the point where I’m not eating the entire dish in one sitting, you’ll know that’s when the cancer’s really got to me. That’s when it’s got me.”

  He chuckled. Looked down at his orange juice as though to drink it—and then did not.

  “I don’t really know her,” I said. Yola was resting a hand on Lillie’s arm. “But she seems…nice. Devoted to Richard.”

  “Devoted?” said Jerry. “Huh. No, I don’t think I’d use that word. Yola loved Richard, sure, she was the closest thing he had to family for a while. But devoted? Makes it sound like she blindly worshipped him or something. Hell no. Yola calls bullshit when she sees it, and you know Rich. He was full of it. What made you say that?”

  “Nothing, nothing.”

  Yola was wiping tears from the corners of her eyes with her fingertips as she spoke to Lillie. Her husband offered a tissue.

  “Come on, Elsie.”

  “She just—she said something to me, that’s all. About our divorce. She clearly doesn’t think much of me.”

  Jerry laughed. “Your divorce? That was a lifetime ago.”

  “I know,” I said. “That’s why I said she was devoted to Richard. It was a long time ago, so I don’t get why she has it in for me. Especially about a divorce that, as you know, was mutual.”

  “Was it?”

  I turned to look at him. “Yes.”

  He raised his eyebrows, pursed his lips.

  We turned back to watch Yola and Lillie. I thought that maybe Jerry would drop the subject, but he never had been one to back down.

  After a few seconds of silence, he made a kind of drawn-out wincing sound. “Ehh,” he said, “well…I know how it is—two sides to every story. But as I recall, you were the one who left.”