by Amy Korman
“The Bests,” I told Bootsie. “They’re fighting over moving to Florida.”
“Heard about that at the club.” She nodded. “Word is that they met with Barclay Shields about selling their place.”
“Hugh met with him,” I said. “Jimmy doesn’t want to sell, and Hugh’s not sure, either.”
“You don’t think those two could have attacked Barclay, do you?”
“I don’t think they could stop fighting long enough to get the job done,” I told her. Truthfully, I couldn’t imagine the Bests going after Barclay, but I’d have to give it more thought after we were finished with this furniture transport.
Two minutes later, we pulled into Sophie’s sweeping driveway behind her SUV, and I took a moment to get another good look at Casa Shields in the full light of day. Yup, it was pretty much how it had seemed the night before: huge, and from the Dynasty school of architecture. I could swear that even the squirrels and birds perched in the trees and bushes were gawking at Sophie’s oversize house, their bright button eyes confused.
Sophie, looking excited and a little stressed, was waiting for us in the driveway in her pink sweat suit. Gerda meanwhile, unlatched the doors of the truck bed and lifted a large, heavy desk from the back of the truck as effortlessly as if it were a loaf of bread. There was a lot of action going on in the driveway: In front of the Escalade and our U-Haul was a truck bearing Chef Gianni’s navy-blue logo, and a familiar black SUV.
“Beebee, it’s nice of you to help Kristin schlep this stuff!” Sophie said to Bootsie. “I’ll show you girls around the place.”
I had to admit that Sophie herself made her house seem a lot less daunting. Her I’m-from-Joisey! vibe was friendly and easy, and she didn’t seem to take herself all that seriously. Sophie was like the Keebler Elf, done up in Cavalli outfits and sent to live in the Emerald City. She definitely didn’t seem dangerous, and her anger at Barclay seemed more like the kind that she would pursue with highly paid lawyers, rather than the rage that might inspire her to send Gerda out to bludgeon her ex.
I just couldn’t picture Sophie as the mastermind behind trying to kill Barclay.
“Sophie, where we put this stuff?” asked Gerda, who had put down the desk in the driveway, and was buckling on a back brace.
“You know what, I’m hiring a new interior designer, so I gotta redo the whole house,” said Sophie. “But the decorator said he needs to draw up plans before we figure out what to do with this junk. So for now, we’re just gonna stuff it all in the wine cellar,” she explained.
“In the cellar?” barked Gerda. She cracked her knuckles. “I don’t think so. Cellar is where I have my office.”
“We’re not gonna put the stuff anywhere near your office,” Sophie explained to her. “It’s all going to go into Barclay’s stupid wine cellar. It’s on the opposite side of the basement, Gerda.”
Gerda’s face registered an imminent tantrum, but she finally nodded her agreement. Bootsie and I grabbed a couple of small boxes from the truck.
Sophie trotted up the entrance stairs. “Come on in!” she said, pushing open the enormous wooden door. “I have a big surprise for you girls!”
“I don’t like surprises,” said Gerda grimly.
Inside the foyer were blindingly white marble floors, purple walls, a massive gilded staircase, and a slim young man who had a tape measure in one hand and was gazing, horrified, at a chandelier above him that looked like a disco ball had exploded.
“Here’s my new decorator . . . it’s your friend Joe!” shrieked Sophie. “We’re gonna use all the crap from your store, and then get even more antiques,” crowed Sophie to me, “which is gonna probably give my husband another angioplasty! I mean, he’s literally gonna blow a gasket. He once popped a vein in his eye when I brought home a Tiffany lamp.”
“Of course, that’s not the goal here, to make your husband blow a gasket,” said Joe, looking harried.
“He already did blow one!” said Sophie. “That’s why he needed the angioplasty!”
Chapter 12
IT TOOK A few moments to absorb the foyer and the various rooms that I could glimpse from where we stood. Jeannie’s bottle on I Dream of Jeannie and the Borgata in Atlantic City sprang to mind as possible design influences. Purple was the dominant color, and crystal, glitter, and gold vermeil seemed to be other key components of the overall look.
This color palette and profusion of shininess definitely wasn’t going to fly with Joe, who stood surrounded by fan decks of paint colors, fabric swatches, and his omnipresent measuring tape, and wore the expression that one imagines the deckhands on the Titanic had as they helped load the lifeboats.
“Joe is gonna work some magic here!” shrieked Sophie, gesturing to him, Vanna White style. “He thinks he can make my house a little more ‘old Philadelphia.’ But it’s still gonna be kinda glitzy and fabulous, right, hon?”
“I don’t think ‘glitzy’ is what we’ll be trying to achieve,” said Joe patiently, but with desperation in his blue eyes. Joe seemed composed, but I could tell that his mind was roiling with an inner debate that went something like, I’m going to make a ton of money from this job, but it might not be worth it if I’m institutionalized with a nervous breakdown.
From what I could see all around me—the giant spangled chandelier, a mauve dining room to my right, and a giant gilded console table with cherub heads and wings sprouting from it over by the stairs—a complete gut job was the only shot at bringing “old Philadelphia” into this house.
I surreptitiously peeked into Sophie’s dining room, which had a smoked purple glass table and chairs upholstered in lavender silk atop gold legs. It was as if a red-carpet outfit worn by Nicki Minaj had somehow multiplied, flown to Bryn Mawr, and become a dining room.
“You know, Joe,” said Sophie, tapping her small, sneakered foot, evidently continuing a debate that had started prior to our arrival, “I hear what you were saying about losing some of the purple. But I gotta tell you that I took Honey Potts and Mariellen Merriwether for a quick tour of the house last night, and they were absolutely speechless!”
“I’m sure they were,” agreed Joe. I wondered why Bootsie was being surprisingly well behaved, merely listening to Joe and Sophie, rather than inspecting each room. Then I remembered she’d already snooped through the house the night before.
“Actually, the only thing those two ladies said the whole time was that they both wanted their drinks topped off,” giggled Sophie. “I’ll tell ya, I thought people drank a lot in Joisey, but that’s nothing compared to you Bryn Mawr people!”
Just then, Channing from Restaurant Gianni emerged from a hallway into the foyer, carrying a giant plastic container filled with spoons and serving utensils, heading toward the front door to take them out to Gianni’s truck. When he saw us he paused, smiled, and stood there for a minute as we took in the display of rippling muscles and movie-star bone structure.
All of our jaws dropped, even Gerda’s. If anything, this guy looked even better than he had the night before.
“Hi there,” he said, in an absurdly deep, testosterone-oozing voice to all of us, white teeth flashing like Chiclets in his tanned face. We all sighed. It was like an Armani model had suddenly jumped off a billboard and mistakenly wandered into Sophie’s crazy purple front hall.
“Everybody, this is Channing,” Sophie said, grabbing one of his glistening biceps. “He’s the—the—some kind of chef—what the hell are you again, Channing?”
“I’m the sous-chef at Restaurant Gianni,” said Channing, flashing us a grin. “Well, nice to meet you all,” he added, climbing into the truck as we all watched his departure appreciatively. He looked almost as good going as he had coming. We all came back to reality, Bootsie almost in a full drool, as Gerda shut the door behind him.
“Isn’t he hawt?” squeaked Sophie. “His tush is like two big round honeydews!”
“Let’s move stuff,” said Gerda, getting back to business.
&nb
sp; “Yeah, good idea,” said Joe. “I’ll help.”
“I lead you to basement,” Gerda barked. “Stay only where I tell you.”
“Is Channing a, uh, trusted employee of Chef Gianni?” wondered Bootsie, as she and I each picked up boxes to schlep down to the wine cellar. We followed Gerda’s spandex backside and Sophie’s tiny pink one into a lavender hallway that led toward the kitchen, turned left into a side hallway, and went down a flight of stairs to the basement.
“I guess so,” said Sophie. “I mean, Channing seems like a nice guy. Then again, who knows? Or cares! He’s so freakin’ handsome that I’ve never really paid attention to his personality.”
“Has he worked for the chef long?” continued Bootsie, as we trudged down the beige-carpeted steps, her head swiveling around as Gerda flicked on some overhead lights.
“You know, Beebee, I’m not sure,” said Sophie, “but Channing seems to be real friendly with the chef’s girlfriend, Jessica. I saw them talking together a lot last night. They were over in a corner of the yard for quite a while. Channing was supposed to be prepping the shellfish buffet. Gianni got really red in the face when he noticed that Channing hadn’t finished setting up that buffet by four-fifteen. I mean, the chef could be next for an angioplasty if he doesn’t watch it!”
The basement was huge, the length of the house, and carpeted in basic beige, with an ugly faux-Irish-pub-style bar directly in front of us, and an equally dumb-looking pool table with lots of ridiculous scrollwork and carving on the legs to its left. There were some light-up beer signs on the walls behind it. Joe followed us down, wincing. I guess he hadn’t seen the basement yet.
The space was mostly open with French doors that led out to the swimming pool, but at each end were two smaller rooms. The door to the one on the left was closed—most likely Gerda’s office, since she was aggressively pointing us to the right, and blocking off the area near the closed door to the left like a bouncer on a busy night at Studio 54 circa 1977. We followed Sophie, avoiding Gerda’s glowering countenance.
“Sounds like Channing and Jessica are close,” Bootsie said unsubtly.
“Yeah, they are! I think Channing drives Jessica home late at night when the chef is stuck at work,” Sophie told us innocently, opening the door to her wine cellar.
I knew Bootsie and I were both thinking more along the lines of Channing and Jessica getting hot and sweaty nowhere near a stove.
“This wine cellar is really nice,” observed Joe, sounding surprised. I looked around at the room, which did have a pleasant, ancient-French-manor vibe, with charming stone floor and wooden wine racks. There was a long wooden table and chairs with a silver tray full of wineglasses and a corkscrew, evoking a dining room somewhere deep in the lavender-covered hills of Provence.
“I thought your husband hated antiques!” I said to Sophie.
“Yeah, he does. All this stuff is brand-new. It just looks old, since he freaks out if stuff is actually antique,” she said. “Barclay paid extra to get new stones, and then had these French guys beat the crap out of the rocks over in France to give them a weathered look.”
We all refrained from pointing that rocks are, by definition, weathered.
“The table’s new, too,” Sophie told us. “Those Frenchies whacked the hell outta that with some tire irons to give it, like, dings and dents!”
“Well, it looks great,” I said.
“It should be great!” Sophie shrieked. “With all the money Barclay spent on it, plus the fifty thousand he spent two years ago on all those cases of stupid French wines! It was my idea to have an Irish pub in the basement, too.”
Joe looked upset at the mention of the bar, but didn’t say anything.
“Where’s all the wine?” asked Bootsie.
“My ex took it with him!” said Sophie. “Truck pulled up when he moved out all his custom suits. All he left me was three bottles of crappy merlot.”
“You know my friend Holly?” I asked Sophie. “She gave away all her ex’s Armani and Brioni suits to charity during their breakup.”
“That’s a good one!” shrieked Sophie admiringly.
“You could still donate his cars,” Bootsie told her. “I’d do it while he’s in the hospital. Holly gave her ex’s car to the Police Athletic League. I can get you in the newspaper for that, if the cars are worth more than a hundred grand. We always do stories with a photo when people donate more than a hundred thousand dollars to charity.”
“Ooh, that might work,” Sophie breathed, taking a minute to roll this over in her mind. “He’s got the new convertible and then there’s the Porsche Cayenne. The Cayenne might be worth a hundred grand just on its own. I can have Gerda research it.”
Gerda nodded, a happy gleam appearing on her face. It was like the sun reappearing on a post-nuclear landscape, and was frankly a little disconcerting.
“Good idea. I get the dollar amounts and make the donations today,” Gerda agreed.
“Anyway, girls, I gotta run. Gerda and I are due for Pilates, and then I’ve got my personal shopper from Saks coming to drop off some clothes, and then I have hair at noon,” Sophie rattled on, looking like an expensive pink chipmunk as she marched to the door, jingling her bracelets. “So I’m kinda busy. If you can unpack the smaller stuff and put it on that table, then Joe can do his decorating thing with it later.
“Help yourselves to anything from the kitchen. We got a lot of leftover crab claws up there!” Sophie disappeared, Gerda on her heels.
“Rest of basement is off-limits.” Gerda chewed out the words at us over her shoulder as she left. I guess her good mood about donating Barclay’s cars had disappeared.
“I keep thinking she’s going to come out dressed in lederhosen, and axe-murder us,” Joe whispered to me and Bootsie.
“She could beat up any of us, even me,” Bootsie agreed.
“I’ll help you move a couple of boxes.” Joe sighed. “Then I have to get back upstairs. You have no idea how much work I’ve got ahead of me. That guy who climbed Mount Everest with all his toes frozen off had it easy compared to this decorating gig. Even the books in this place are purple.”
“It’s going to take you all summer,” agreed Bootsie gleefully.
“Sophie told me she’s got Barclay’s crew coming to start painting tomorrow,” Joe added, “so I’ve got to choose paint colors pronto. Normally, I don’t like to rush into color decisions, but Barclay’s whole crew is temporarily out of work due to all the lawsuits against his company right now, and Sophie said we should keep them busy.”
Joe, Bootsie, and I schlepped in the rest of the boxes and furniture from the U-Haul. Then Joe, looking depressed, disappeared with a fan deck of paint colors.
Per Sophie’s instructions, I started carefully unpacking boxes of china and lining everything up on the big table, wondering how these old Philadelphia tchotchkes were ever going to fit into the Vegas decor.
Then again, Joe is really good at what he does. Holly’s place downtown with Howard was amazing, all modern art and antiques with a Parisian–New York flair. Her new Divorce House would no doubt be just as great when Joe was done with it.
Meanwhile, after three minutes, Bootsie lost interest in unpacking. She took a seat at the table and drummed her fingers on the chic, battered oak surface. Honestly, Bootsie’s attention span is even worse than mine, and was never that great, even in high school. Field hockey and gossip were about the only things that kept her interest. Her leg started tapping, too, and her sky-blue eyes took on a telltale nosy gleam.
“The Pilates equipment is up on the third floor, as I learned last night during the party when I just happened to wander up there,” she told me in a loud whisper, jumping up from the table and heading to the wine cellar door back into the basement. “So I’m going to take a little exploratory stroll around down here. Gerda will never hear me from all the way on the top floor.”
“No!” I hissed at her. “I don’t want Sophie to be
mad at me. And what if Gerda comes down here and I’m all by myself!”
Too late. Bootsie was gone. I dashed after her, lugging a pair of silver candlesticks, as she headed for Gerda’s bunker—of course.
“She’s probably got the door alarmed!” I told Bootsie in a panic.
Sophie was easygoing, but if she got upset with us for breaking into a locked door in her basement, she could still return my entire inventory to The Striped Awning, and if I had to refund her seven thousand, five hundred, and seventy-dollars, I was ruined. And while I didn’t necessarily buy into Bootsie’s theory that Gerda had attacked both Barclay and the chef . . . it was possible. Bootsie and I could be next on Gerda’s hit list.
“She doesn’t have an alarm,” said Bootsie calmly. “There aren’t any sensors on the door. She might have it booby-trapped, but I can risk that.” She tried the door handle. Locked.
Bootsie pulled a barrette out of her blond bob and poked it into the lock, jiggled it, and the door popped open.
“Where’d you learn to do that?” I said, impressed.
“My parents’ liquor cabinet. They installed a lock when we were in high school, remember? My brothers and I learned how to pick it that same night. It’s been a hobby ever since.”
She disappeared inside Gerda’s office. I stood outside, adrenaline pumping, clutching the candlesticks and keeping watch for Gerda. Luckily, Bootsie returned in less than three minutes.
“Everything is spic-and-span in there,” she said dejectedly. “And there’s a desk with a padlock that I don’t know how to pick on the file drawer. Naturally, the computer’s password-protected.”
To my relief, she shut the door. “I’ll have to research that lock and get back in there another time.”
Euphoric at the prospect of getting out of here before Gerda returned, I quickly finished the unpacking while Bootsie sent some text messages to her coworkers at the paper describing Sophie’s purple house, and snapped a few pics of the bar and its neon Bud Light signs to share on every social media site she could think of.
