The Woman Who Fell From Grace

by David Handler

Everyone waved good-bye. We waved back. Then I let out the Jag’s parking brake and eased it down the twisting drive and out the front gate. We started for home.

  I don’t ever want to see another goddamned peacock again as long as I live.

  I found Gordie sitting outside on the lawn, glumly tossing his ball against a retaining wall and catching it with his mitt. There were other boys out there playing ball, but he was ignoring them. The hospital had nice grounds, lots of grass, and trees and walking paths. You almost didn’t notice the fence.

  He lit up when he saw me. “Hey, Hoagy! How ya doing?”

  “Just fine, Gordie. Heading up to Connecticut. I wanted to say good-bye.”

  “Can I come with you?” he begged. “Pleath?”

  I shook my head.

  “How come they’re making me live here, Hoagy?”

  “I guess they think it’s for the best.”

  “How come?”

  I took the ball from him. “Go deep. I’ll throw you one.”

  He eagerly trotted off across the lawn. I wound up and sent one high through the air toward him. He picked up the flight of it right away, drifted back and to his left, and punched his mitt. He was there waiting for it when it came down.

  I joined him, rubbing my shoulder. We walked.

  “I’ll be keeping Sadie for you,” I told him.

  “They won’t let me have her here.”

  “I know. I’ll take good care of her. She’s still your cat. When you’re ready for her, just let me know. I gave them my address at the desk in case you ever want to write her. Or me. Okay?”

  “Okay.” He glanced over his shoulder to see if we were alone, then looked up at me slyly. “Keep a theecret, Hoagy?” Sure.

  A sneaky grin crossed his face. “C’mere. Wanna show ya thumthin’.”

  He led me into the trees over by the fence, behind some bushes. “You may sthee me thooner than ya think,” he whispered, kicking at the undergrowth with his foot.

  There was a big hole in the earth there under one of the bushes. He was digging. Tunneling out.

  I must have gotten a whiff of pollen. My eyes were suddenly bothering me, and I had trouble swallowing. I grabbed him under his arms and hoisted him up, hugged him tightly to my chest.

  He squirmed in my arms. “Hey, what’d you do that for?” he demanded, horrified.

  “I don’t know.” I put him down.

  “Well, don’t do it again.”

  “Okay, I won’t.”

  “I’m not a baby, y’know.”

  “I know. Sorry.” I stuck out my hand. “See you, Gordie.”

  He shook it. “Sthee ya.”

  I started walking away.

  “Hey, Hoagy!” he called after me.

  I stopped. “Yeah, Gordie?”

  “Take it thlow.”

  I smiled. “Slows the only way to take it.”

  I went back to the car without looking back.

  We cleared Washington by lunchtime and beat the rush hour out of New York onto the New England Thruway. It was nearing dusk when we crossed the Connecticut River into Old Lyme. Lulu jumped into Pam’s lap and stuck her large black nose out the window as we made our way up Route 156 into the rolling hills of Lyme. Spring was happening all over again up here. The forsythia was ablaze, the apple trees and dogwoods blossoming. It would be nice to go through spring for a second time. This one might even make up for the first one.

  Lulu started to whoop when I turned off onto the narrow country lane that dead-ended at those old stone walls flanking the dirt driveway. I stopped for a second to take it all in — the lush green fields, the fruit trees and duck pond, the snug old yellow house and chapel, big red carriage barn, Merilee’s beloved old Land-Rover. Lulu, impatient, jumped out and sped up the drive without us.

  She found her mommy out behind the house turning over her vegetable garden. She had on rubber boots and old jeans and a flannel shirt that once belonged to me. Her waist-length golden hair was in a braided ponytail, and she had mud all over her face. Lulu was whooping and moaning. Merilee knelt in the rich soil, stroking her. She looked up at me a bit warily when she heard me approach.

  “Thought I’d finish the book here, if you don’t mind,” I said.

  She turned back to Lulu. “I don’t mind.”

  “I can stay in the chapel,” I offered.

  “If you wish,” she said, her eyes still on Lulu.

  “I don’t.”

  “Then don’t,” she said. “Stay in the chapel, I mean.”

  “Okay, I won’t.”

  “Good.”

  We both watched Lulu.

  “It turned sour on her,” I reported. “He dumped her.”

  “The brute.”

  “I did what I could, but she desperately needs a mother’s touch right now.”

  “My poor baby,” she said, rubbing Lulu’s ears. “She’s lost her innocence.”

  “It’s true. She’s already started reading Erica Jong.”

  Merilee looked up at me. “Hoagy?”

  “Yes, Merilee?”

  “Hello.”

  “Hello yourself,” I said.

  She got to her feet and started toward me. She stopped, peered at something over my shoulder. “Is that … Pam in the car?”

  “She needs a place to stay. I figured you wouldn’t mind.”

  “Mind? Gracious, I just hope I’m worthy of her.”

  “You’ll more than do.”

  “But I look terrible,” she said, brushing herself off.

  “Just awful,” I agreed, grinning.

  She came up to me and kissed me and fingered the bandage on the side of my head, her brow creased with concern.

  I took her in my arms and held her. “Just a minor brush with death,” I said, getting lost in her green eyes. “How’s Elliot?”

  “Hmpht.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “That’s for me to know and you to never find out,” she replied primly.

  “What did he … ?”

  “He got fresh.”

  “He got what?”

  “You heard me. The big fat gherkin knocked me over and … ”

  “And what, Merilee?”

  “Never mind.”

  “Did he put his snout where he shouldn’t have?”

  “Mister Hoagy!”

  “You can’t blame the fellow, Merilee. You put him back in the pink. It was just his way of saying thank you.”

  “That’s not what Mr. Hewlett said. He gave me a severe tongue-lashing.”

  “Elliot or Mr. Hewlett?”

  “Stop it. He said I shouldn’t have gotten so close to him, what with his age and the time of year and all.”

  “Don’t sell yourself short. You’re also a lot better looking than what he’s used to. Smell a hell of a lot better, too. So what did you do?”

  “Stick around for a somewhat tardy Easter supper and you’ll find out,” she replied wickedly.

  “No … ”

  “Mr. Hewlett said it was the proper thing to do.”

  “Well, well. This is a whole new pioneer side of you, Merilee.”

  “It is. Producers had better watch themselves around me from now on, or risk the consequences. Ex-husbands, too.”

  “I’ll remember that.”

  “Do so.”

  There was some business going on at our feet now. Sadie was rubbing up against my leg and yowling.

  “And who might this be?” Merilee wondered, picking her up and cradling her in the crook of her arm. Sadie dabbed at her sleeve with her paws and began to make small motorboat noises.

  “Don’t ask me. Never saw her before.”

  “Hoagy … ”

  “Her name is Sadie. She’s kind of on permanent loan. Not a terrible mouser. Every farm should have one, don’t you think?”

  She smiled at me. “I thought you hated cats.”

  “I do.” I sighed. “It’s a long story, and not a pretty one.”

  She gave me her up
-from-under look, the one that makes my knees wobble. “I’ve got time.”

  “I haven’t. Excuse me.” I started for the house.

  “Where are you going?” she called after me.

  I went in the back door into the big old farm kitchen. I still had half a bottle of Glenmorangie in the cupboard. I poured two fingers in a glass and added some well water from the tap and drank it down. Out the window I could see Merilee and Pam cheerfully getting reacquainted out by the duck pond. I made myself another stiff one before I picked up the wall phone. I dialed the number from memory. My hands shook. My heart was pounding. It rang twice and then I heard the voice. And then I said it.

  I said, “Hello, Dad.”

  Turn the page to continue reading from the Stewart Hoag Mysteries

  Chapter 1

  MATTHEW WAX’S VERY OWN LITTLE MOVIE studio, Bedford Falls, kept its very own little suite of rooms all year around on the eighteenth floor of the Waldorf Towers, the major-bucks wing of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. The Towers comes with its own special entrance around on Fiftieth Street off Park, its own doorman, its own desk, its own elevator, and its own style, or lack of it. Understated elegance is what they aim for. Stodgy is about as close as they get. Still, the security isn’t terrible. Ronnie and Nancy used to stay there when they hit town from the White House. The Bushes still do. On this crisp autumn morning the place was a madhouse and there wasn’t even a single politician in town. Unless you count the mayor, and not many people do. The street outside was mobbed with reporters and photographers and television news crews. There was local TV, national TV, tabloid TV. A Current Affair was there. Inside Edition was there. Hard Copy, Entertainment Tonight, everybody was there. The police had set up blue barricades to contain all of them, but it was no use. They spilled out into the street, blocking traffic and exchanging graphic taunts with the cab drivers who were trying to get by. Limo drivers who were parked there gulped hot coffee from take-out cups and enjoyed the free show. And the divorce war between Matthew Wax, the most successful director in the history of Hollywood, and Pennyroyal Brim, his breathtakingly adorable leading lady, was indeed a show. The press hadn’t pursued a bedtime story with such lunatic zeal since Donald and Ivana split. Every morning brought fresh hot scoops, each more lurid and venal than the last. Just this morning alone The National Enquirer had Pennyroyal claiming that Matthew had forced her to make love to her costar, Johnny Forget, in a bathtub while he sat there watching them do it. The Star, not to be outdone, was contending that Pennyroyal was secretly pregnant. The identity of her love child’s father was being kept under wraps, they revealed, though Pennyroyal’s current boyfriend, actor Trace Washburn, certainly had to be the lead candidate. I doubted that. My own money was on Elvis.

  I stood there on the edge of the crowd for a moment, collecting myself, much like a diver up on the high board. The only difference is he dives into clear blue water, and I was diving into a sewer. I took a deep breath and plunged right in, elbows flying. It gets a little easier every time I do it.

  At the door I was halted by a phalanx of gruff, beefy cops in uniform. I gave one of them my name and assured him I was expected. He looked me over top to bottom. I wore the glen plaid double-breasted cashmere suit I’d had made for me in London by Stricklands. There was a fresh white carnation in my lapel. The white cotton broadcloth shirt and burgundy-and-yellow silk bow tie were from Turnbull and Asser, the silver cuff links from Grandfather, the cordovan brogans from Maxwell’s. My trench coat was over my arm. My borsalino, freshly blocked for the fall, was on my head. I did not look like any of the others. This he couldn’t deny. Grudgingly, he gave my name to the doorman, who gave it to the desk. He called up. After a moment, they let me inside. I still had to wait in the lobby for a security guard to come down and get me. I did, watching the commotion outside.

  It was no surprise that this one was so hot, given the principal players and their images and the millions of dollars involved. In one corner we had Matthew Wax, the gentle giant with his gee-whiz films and gee-whiz life-style. The man was straight out of Ozzie and Harriet. He didn’t smoke or drink or take drugs. He liked his mom, milkshakes, and his privacy. Matthew Wax was only nineteen years old when he directed his first TV series. He had gone on from there to helm five of the ten top grossing films in Hollywood history, including Yeti, Yeti II and the highest grosser of them all, Dennis the Dinosaur. Estimates of his personal worth ran somewhere between $250 and $400 million, depending on who you talked to, and he wasn’t forty yet. In the other corner we had Pennyroyal Brim, the goody-goody star of his last three movies, the perky, dimply little twenty-five-year-old blonde who was so squeaky clean she made Lady Di look dirty. And so impossibly cute the public had fallen for her just as Matthew Wax had. She was Pretty Penny, America’s sweetie pie and People magazine’s most popular cover girl. Her adorable dimples were even insured by Lloyds of London for two million dollars—one million per dimple. Two years ago, she and Matthew Wax had tied the knot. For each it was their first. Six months ago, she had given birth to their first child, a healthy baby boy they named George Bailey Wax. “Little Georgie,” America’s cutest little mother called him. It was all right out of a storybook or, more appropriately, a Matthew Wax movie. Until the marriage abruptly fell apart a few weeks ago. Penny had filed for divorce citing irreconcilable differences, most notably Matthew’s “personal and professional tyranny.” She wanted sole custody of Little Georgie and—given that they lived in California, land of golden sunshine and community property—one half of Matthew Wax’s entire fortune, including Bedford Falls, the independent movie studio he had purchased a few years before. Matthew’s counteroffer: joint custody of Little Georgie, the deed to their Pacific Palisades mansion, an undisclosed cash settlement believed to be around ten million dollars, and no share of Bedford Falls. That’s when it turned ugly.

  She hired herself Abel Zorch, the meanest, most ballistic divorce attorney in Los Angeles, a flamboyantly gay bad-ass who loved the limelight so much he had his own full-time publicist. In an earlier life, Abel Zorch had been a hand-picked Nixon thug, a high-ranking young official in the Committee to Re-Elect the President. Unlike so many of the others, he’d been smart enough to leave no fingerprints behind when Watergate hit the fan. In fact, a number of well-informed people believed it was he who was Deep Throat. He quickly relocated in Hollywood. It proved to be a natural fit. A gifted go-between, deal maker, dispenser of favors, and trader of inside information, Zorch was now one of the most powerful men in the movie business, and certainly one of its most ruthless. Out there he was known as the Iguana—because of his personality and because he happened to look like one. No one liked to go up against him. To do so was to get Zorched. And that’s what was happening right now to Matthew Wax. Pretty Penny’s lawyer was destroying him. Day after day, nasty little items about Matthew’s carefully guarded private life were finding their way into the tabloids. Items about how he kept Penny a virtual prisoner in her own home. About how he was a Howard Hughes-like recluse who spent hundreds of hours at a stretch in a darkened room eating Fig Newtons and watching tapes of old movies and TV shows. About how he hated to bathe and refused to cut his toenails. And how he suffered from chronic premature ejaculation. And was hung up on his mother. And insisted on sleeping in twin beds because Beaver Cleaver’s parents had. On and on it went. And it would keep on going until Matthew backed down. But he wouldn’t. Instead, he had sued Pretty Penny for defamation of character. And withdrawn his settlement offer. He now wanted sole custody of Georgie, claiming Penny was an unfit mother. His basis for this: the very public affair she was carrying on with Trace Washburn, the fiftyish, ruggedly handsome leading man who had starred in a number of Matthew’s biggest hits and whose reputation as a filmland hound rivaled that of Warren Beatty. “Best sex I’ve ever had,” America’s sweetie pie had boasted to the world on page one of the New York Post. “It’s great to be with a real man for a change.”

  The press was calling it the
House of Wax.

  The public couldn’t get enough of it.

  For me, it was just another day at the office.

  The security guard was big and blond and bulked up. He carried an old copy of the first novel, Our Family Enterprise, the one that prompted the Times to label me “the first major new literary voice of the eighties.” The one that won me every award in existence, including Merilee Nash. I still have the awards someplace. Merilee is another story. My picture is on the back of the dust jacket. I’m standing on the roof of my brownstone looking awful goddamned sure of myself, and about nineteen.

  He peered at it, then at me. “You’re Stewart Hoag?”

  “I am.”

  “I don’t know,” he said unsurely. “You look awful different here.”

  “You would, too.”

  “I guess this was taken a long time ago, huh?”

  “Why don’t you take out your gun and finish the job?”

  “No need to be touchy, mister. Just being careful. This way, please.” He started for the elevator, then stopped. He had noticed Lulu, my basset hound, for the first time. She was traveling incognito that season in the wraparound shades she’d taken to wearing when she picked up a dose of pinkeye while summering at Merilee’s farm. Her eyes were perfectly fine now. She’d kept on wearing the shades because she thought they made her look sexy. I thought they made her look like George Shearing.

  “Is she with you?” the guard wanted to know.

  “She is,” I replied. “But we still haven’t made any serious commitment to each other. If you want to take a crack at her, I won’t stand in your way.”

  He started to say something. Nothing came out except for an exasperated grunt. I get a lot of those. The three of us got into the elevator and he punched eighteen. Then the doors closed and up we went.

  To be honest, this wasn’t where I really wanted to be right now. Fiji was my first choice. Merilee was shooting a movie there with Michelle Pfeiffer. It’s a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it. I had stayed behind to work on novel number three. It’s a dirty job, but nobody’s got to do it. She also hadn’t invited me to come along with her. The two of them were playing turn-of-the-century Catholic nuns who fall in love with each other. Merilee didn’t think she could stay in character if I were there. Or so she’d said. The fact is we hadn’t been getting along too well lately. She’d been snappish, moody, distant. Something was troubling her. What, I didn’t know. She had left six weeks ago. For good, according to Liz Smith, who reported the very next day in Newsday that we were no longer an item. Merilee and me, that is. I’d been dumped, said Liz. I didn’t know where she’d heard that. I didn’t know if it was true. Merilee wouldn’t answer any of my letters. I hadn’t heard one word from her since she left. Not even a postcard. I had kept good and busy though. So far I had generated a whopping seventy-five pages of tumid, overheated gibberish. Presently I was lost in a jungle of my own delusions with no compass and only a dull pocket knife to hack my way out with. That takes time, and time takes money. That’s why I was here to see Matthew Wax’s brother-in-law, Sheldon Selden, the president of Bedford Falls. My agent said he answered to Shelley. She didn’t say if he could also roll over and play dead, but she did say he was housebroken—a rarity among studio executives. She thought he sounded nice. They always do, when they want something from you.