Killer WASPs

by Amy Korman

  “Bootsie, please,” I said. “Don’t do this to me.”

  “Okay, okay,” said Bootsie. “It’s Lilly Merriwether! You know, Mariellen’s daughter. The one who wins all the tennis trophies at the club!”

  My ears started clanging, and my heart plummeted ankle-­ward. Had Bootsie really just said Lilly Merriwether? I clutched my desk so as to not topple off my chair. Luckily, a light breeze blew in the open door, which cooled off my clammy forehead as I gulped some water from the glass I keep on my desk. I’d heard, as had everyone in Bryn Mawr, about Lilly’s epic nuptials a few summers before. But I’d never known the name of the groom, since I hadn’t read the announcement in Bootsie’s newspaper.

  Had Bootsie really just told me that the beautiful daughter of Mrs. Perfect Pearls was the former Mrs. Cute Vet?

  WHEN I REGAINED my composure, I realized I could easily picture John and Lilly zinging tennis balls around with matching golden tans and pristine white outfits, Lilly no doubt wearing a strand identical to her mother’s South Seas pearls around her slim neck. “Good game, darling!” Lilly would coo to John Hall in her Grace Kelly lockjaw accent, as they clinked frosty vodka tonics at the end of a match, sitting on chaise longues with monogrammed cushions. Mariellen would look on proudly, clad in a cool linen sheath, nodding as she took a puff of her Virginia Slim and blew a smoke ring.

  “When you say ‘almost divorced,’ ” I asked Bootsie in my best effort at a neutral tone, “do you mean that the vet and Lilly are definitely headed for divorce?”

  “I’m working on confirming that,” Bootsie told me. “I know they’ve been separated for about a year, but I’m not sure where the divorce stands. I’m sure you heard Lilly had a huge and fabulous wedding at Mariellen’s house with two tents and an orchestra. I looked up the wedding announcement in our archive, and Lilly rode into the ceremony on Norman the horse, and at midnight there were forty minutes of fireworks, and then the next day there was a tennis brunch at the club . . .”

  I stopped listening at this point. How could I, with my Gap and J. Crew outlet wardrobe, long wavy brown hair, sorry-­ass forehand, and weird devotion to a basset hound, ever compete with Lilly Merriwether? John must have been desperate for dinner companionship to ask me out. He was used to utter blond perfection, round-­the-­clock tennis, and the manicured grounds of the Merriwether house.

  I looked around my slightly battered shop, which until I’d heard this, I’d considered charming, and my gaze paused at Waffles, who was sprawled on his bed, drooling, looking incredibly portly. One ear was stuck to the floor, encrusted with remnants of his rawhide bone. And there was a distinctly funky smell floating from over his way—­he’d just farted. This was the final indignity.

  I’d go ahead and meet John as planned tonight, since it was too late to cancel. And then after that, I’d forget about him, and move on.

  “Anyway, I think the vet would be a good person to date, if you can be sure that Lilly’s out of the picture,” Bootsie said.

  “Um-­hmm,” I answered listlessly.

  “Anyway, after the Googling, I stopped by Louis the lawyer’s office to see if any news had come in,” Bootsie continued, changing subjects. “And it had. Including one huge lie Sophie Shields told us!”

  I listened with mild interest, too depressed about the vet and Lilly Merriwether to get excited about this development vis-­à-­vis Sophie.

  “Remember when Sophie said that she needed Barclay alive to get her divorce settlement?” Bootsie asked. I nodded. Sophie had told us that within five minutes of meeting us, actually. And in the days since the attack, it had served to rule her out as a possible attempted murderess.

  “Well, it’s bullshit!” Bootsie crowed happily. “If Barclay dies, Sophie gets seven million in a life insurance policy that Barclay can’t cancel until they’re one-­hundred-­percent divorced. Louis explained the whole thing to me. He and Sophie’s lawyers agreed to the insurance policy staying in place until they work out the divorce agreement. Apparently, it’s pretty common to have a deal like this when a ­couple is splitting up and there’s significant wealth at stake.”

  I tore my mind away from Lilly and John, and thought about what Bootsie was telling me. Sophie had a motive to kill Barclay, after all.

  “But how much is Sophie likely to get in her divorce settlement from Barclay if he doesn’t die?” I wondered aloud, secretly hoping there was so much money at stake that Sophie couldn’t logically be the attacker of her ex. Sophie was starting to grow on me. “More than seven million?”

  “Undetermined!” Bootsie said. “She’ll get a lot, of course, since I doubt she’d marry a refrigerator like Barclay if there wasn’t some major cash in the offing. Louis can’t comment, of course, since he’s Barclay’s attorney, and it’s privileged information.”

  I rolled my eyes. Louis had obviously breached a ton of legal ethics already by telling Bootsie about the insurance policy, and numerous other details. Why stop now?

  “But I got the distinct feeling that the Shieldses’ pre-­nup would give Sophie less than the insurance policy,” said Bootsie, with an air of knowledgeable self-­satisfaction. “Louis hinted that Sophie would get more out of Barclay being dead than if he lived to sign the divorce agreement.”

  This was bad news, because along with Sophie’s passion for statues, she had an upbeat, hopeful personality and an appealing, up-­for-­anything attitude. Hopefully her go-­getter attitude didn’t include trying to kill her Sub-­Zero-­size husband.

  Bootsie rattled on about how Sophie and Gerda could have carried out the attack on Barclay in tandem, but I had stopped listening.

  “Bootsie,” I asked her suddenly, “do you think you could give me some tennis lessons?”

  Chapter 15

  BOOTSIE AND I made a date for a lesson the following morning at her parents’ court, since there was no way I was displaying my crappy forehand at the club for all the Merriwethers to see. Maybe I really did have some talent with a racket, I thought hopefully, despite about thirty years of evidence to the contrary, as Bootsie left and headed back to her office.

  At four, I decided no one was buying any more antiques today. I took Waffles home, showered, did a quick makeup and hair blitz, and put on the white dress. I checked in with Hugh Best, who hadn’t heard from Jimmy; I encouraged Hugh to keep calling friends in the Prince­ton alumni directory, and promised to spend the next morning driving around town hunting for Jimmy. I decided to head over to the club early, leaving Waffles on his bed in the kitchen, snoring.

  Five minutes later, I parked under my usual tree at the club, but the familiar, charming old building didn’t do much to quell my anxiety. I was an hour and half early for a date with a guy who was married to—­okay, separated from, but legally married to—­the Perfect Woman, and would probably reconcile with her any day now. I looked down at my outfit, smoothing the skirt of Holly’s Max Mara dress.

  I went inside to have a soda at the bar with Ronnie—­that might calm my nerves. I was determined not to have any wine at all before my date. I went in the club’s front door, crossed the hallway to the bar, peeked into the room, and saw the Binghams had invaded Ronnie’s bar, and were currently working their way through a fresh bottle of white zinfandel. Darn! I did a U-­turn and trotted back out the front door.

  The only option left was the 19th Hole, the club’s snack shed by the driving range, which dispensed beer, wine, and hot dogs. I shouldn’t get that worked up about meeting the vet, I told myself, since it was the first and last date ever with him. I ordered myself to buck up as I passed banks of lilies along the clubhouse exterior. The Hole, as it’s known, with its cold Heineken and free-­flowing pinot grigio, was a cheerful spot, perfect for golfers during the summer. I could really go for a pinot grigio. I revised my self-­imposed rule about no wine before the date. Wine was a good idea, I decided.

  It was a perfect afternoon, breezy, quiet, and peaceful, with the metallic whump of golf clubs in the distance. What was
the use of torturing myself over one more going-­nowhere date? I tried to convince myself. I’d had plenty of those before!

  I still had a few good years left in me, and I was about to learn tennis! Who needed a cute vet, anyway?

  Just then, as I passed the golf cart shed, I saw a flash of red through a window that caught my eye as out of place within the shed’s freshly painted, dark green clapboard exterior and orderly rows of golf cars within. Dusty, rusty red, with a metallic, gritty quality that stuck out amid the white carts, it caught my eye as something familiar, a flash of shape and color that I’d seen many times before. I paused and backtracked, sliding open the garage door that led into the roomy shed, which at night accommodated some three dozen carts, and peered deeper into the dim expanse. There was no mistaking it: The Bests’ Volvo was in the back corner, a large cloth tarp partly concealing its dinged-­up, late-­seventies glory.

  I walked over to the car and gingerly lifted one side of the tarp: There was the familiar giant dent in the driver’s side door, and the inspection sticker dated July 1989. The Metamucil and Kleenex were intact on the front seat, but the backseat of the car was now stuffed with what looked like most of the contents of the Bests’ attic. Silverware and napkin rings in ancient plastic baggies and old books littered the seats, and on the floor were cardboard boxes and a moth-­eaten deer head mounted on a wooden plaque.

  I let the tarp fall back into place and tiptoed out of the shed into the late-­afternoon sun, closed the sliding door behind me, then walked back into the clubhouse and down the air-­conditioned hallway toward the locker rooms. There, I sat on a chintz-­upholstered bench for a minute to digest the presence of the Volvo at the club. A portrait of a 1950s-­era club president in a gray flannel suit stared down at me sternly from across the hallway, which didn’t help me process my next step, now that I’d tracked down my missing neighbor’s car.

  Had Jimmy asked Ronnie if he could park the Volvo here while he holed up somewhere local—­maybe the Marriott in Villanova? It seemed unlikely. Jimmy was way too cheap to pay one hundred thirty-­nine dollars a night for the Marriott, even if it did include a breakfast buffet and a free glass of wine each evening. He didn’t seem to have many friends, but was Hugh right—­could an old fraternity brother have taken Jimmy in?

  One of the ancient members of the club, Mr. Conwell, heir to a soup fortune, walked by on his way to play tennis, and we smiled at each other. He was a very inspiring old guy, lean and fit in his eighties, much like my grandfather had been until the year before he got sick and passed away.

  Too bad Jimmy Best wasn’t more like the friendly Mr. Conwell, I thought. But then again, Mr. Conwell is in possession of approximately seven hundred million dollars’ worth of stock in his family’s food company, so you’d expect him to be in a good mood.

  Then I remembered a winter night in the club bar a few years ago, when my grandfather had regaled me with stories of the club’s glory days in the years just after World War II. Apparently, the club had been a crazy party palace in the late forties, with black-­tie dinner dances on the lawn, rollicking nights in the basement bowling alley, martinis being drunk around the clock, and a teenage Grace Kelly dropping by. “Prettiest girl I’d ever seen,” Grandpa had said, sitting on the Chesterfield sofa and sipping his vodka tonic, “including your grandmother, but I hadn’t met her yet.”

  The club had been Grandpa’s second home back then. He’d spent all his spare time there, because his parents had figured he couldn’t get into too much trouble at a country club. Actually, the activities that went on in the basement bowling alley weren’t all bowling, he’d hinted, but he clarified that he never got to “bowl” with Grace Kelly. There had been drinking, dancing, and other fun distractions for everyone back then, and members had always been dressed in great-­looking suits and tuxedoes, or pretty silk gowns, or tennis whites. Old photos of parties and tennis matches hung on the locker room walls, which attested to the glamour of the forties and fifties.

  “Upstairs on the third floor was where the real action was in those days,” Grandpa had told me, swirling his Scotch and smiling.

  “The third floor?” I’d never been in that part of the club. In fact, I’d never realized there was anything other than an attic on the third floor of the clubhouse, with its turrets and eaves under a shingled roof.

  “Rowdy bunch up there,” Grandpa had told me, and explained that in the first half of the twentieth century, there had been small apartments on the top floor—­suites of rooms that served as a kind of upscale retirement home for members whose wives had passed away. The old guys who lived up there had wandered the halls in their bathrobes and held a poker game that began every morning at eleven, continued through dinner, and raged on until midnight, when the busboys would make everyone go to bed. Apparently, the guys were a cigar-­smoking, waitress-­pinching, whiskey-­chugging bunch who spent their golden years in pure glee. “Good system, actually,” Grandpa said.

  “Very Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon,” I had agreed.

  Remembering this conversation, I suddenly got up and, on a hunch, walked to the end of the hallway past the locker rooms and up a small flight of stairs that led to the second floor of the club. Here, a lofty, maple-­paneled ballroom took up most of the floor—­silent at this time of day, of course, with bits of dust floating peacefully in the sunlight. Just down from the ballroom, a warren of small administrative offices occupied the space directly above the locker rooms. The little stairway I had ascended landed right between the ballroom’s open double doors and a warren of offices at the other end of the hallway, where, it appeared, no one was working at this time of day.

  I knew that there had to be stairs somewhere that led up to the third floor. As I passed office doors marked “Food and Beverage” and “Club Manager,” I came to an old wooden door painted dark green. It was unmarked, and a bit larger than the office doors.

  I tried the handle to the unmarked green door. Locked.

  As I yanked on the doorknob one more time, something caught my eye on the old millwork around the door frame. It was to the right, and just above my head. Something shiny. I peeked up, and hanging from a tiny nail in the side of the millwork was a very old key. And when I slipped it into the lock in the door handle and turned, the old door creaked open loudly, but easily, and revealed a set of wooden stairs. I put the key on the bottom stair (the last thing I needed was to get locked in the club attic), closed the door behind me, and started to climb.

  “OH, FUCK,” SAID Jimmy Best. “It’s you.”

  I didn’t take it personally.

  Once upstairs, it hadn’t taken much work to find him. The flight of stairs ended in a long hallway that was frayed by age. The walls were covered with red-­and-­yellow-­striped wallpaper—­faded, but as chic as the day it had been installed. There were bronze light sconces, prints of hunting scenes, and wide, beautifully aged, polished plank floors. At each end of the hallway was a round, lounge-­like room with pretty, if slightly dusty, mullioned windows overlooking the club lawns. These round rooms must be the interiors of the shingled turrets that flanked each end of the club, I realized, and they were just as appealing here as they were on the building’s exterior. There were two ancient poker tables in the room to my left, complete with chips and yellowed playing cards, and what I recognized as the door to a dumbwaiter directly in front of me. At the other end of the hall, I could see a billiard table and a small wooden bar. It was hot up here, of course, being late May at the top of a stuffy old shingle-­and-­brick building, but there was something frankly awesome about this secret part of the club.

  I’d turned right when I heard jazz floating quietly from that end of the hallway. The music appeared to be coming from under a door marked the “Conwell Suite”—­named for the family of the handsome old man I’d just seen downstairs. This had to be a good suite, I thought to myself, with all that soup money.

  I’d knocked lightly, then gingerly opened the door to Jimmy’s so
ur greeting. He sounded as grouchy as ever, but underneath his mustache and frown, he actually looked relieved to be found. For my part, I was thrilled that he was fully dressed in a pair of old khaki shorts and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up.

  “I’m so glad you’re okay!” I told him, truthfully.

  “Oh, I’m more than okay, darling,” he said with a grin, and lit up a cigar. “I’m fantastic. I can’t tell you how good it is to be finally free of that nagging hen of a brother. I’m smoking, drinking, and eating red meat around the clock. Should have moved up here in 1976, when I divorced my fourth wife.”

  Jimmy was happily ensconced on a leather sofa. White cotton curtains fluttered in the late-­afternoon air by a set of double windows that had been cracked open for fresh air, and a small air conditioner hummed. Not the most energy-­efficient setup, but it definitely provided comfort.

  “This is nice,” I admitted, “but what about your brother? He’s terrified that something’s happened to you.”

  “That old woman!” hooted Jimmy, puffing on his stogie contentedly. “He reminds me of Angela Lansbury.”

  I sighed. I’d have to somehow convince Jimmy to go home, or at least to call Hugh and tell him he was okay. In the meantime, it was hard to deny the appeal of his attic lair. For one thing, the view of the club grounds was gorgeous from up here. There was a cute window seat, and I perched there for a few moments to look out at the lawn, which unfurled in front of me in its emerald lushness. A few tennis players were still out swatting balls, and I squinted to see if any of them were John Hall or, horrors, Lilly Merriwether (which they weren’t—­none of the women playing was as annoyingly slim and tan as the reedlike Lilly). A trumpet vine had grown up from the porch roof and curled around the window frame, its orange bell-­shaped flowers framing the sill perfectly. There was a pleasant clinking of glasses and murmur of ­people chatting below on the porch.