One Dangerous Lady

by Jane Stanton Hitchcock

  “But Jo, the Muni! The Slater Gallery . . . that’s your baby. Are you gonna abandon your baby?”

  “I’ve dropped off that board before, Betts, as you well know.” I was referring to the unfortunate time I’d been subtly asked to resign by the former president, Roger Lowry, because my fortunes had dipped so low. “I’ll be on it again one day, once this interloper derails.”

  “Don’t bet on that train wreck anytime soon,” Betty said. “I can’t tell you the number of people who’ve called asking me how they can get in touch with her so they can invite her to things just so she’ll return the favor. Everyone is dying to see that ghastly apartment of hers. New York is so shameless. Of course, when anybody asks me if I’ve got her number, all I say is, ‘And how.’ ”

  Betty was nothing if not loyal.

  We arrived at the Kahns’ house at around one. They had a large, gray-shingled “cottage,” as they’re called, just down the road from the beach near the Southampton Beach Club. Though the grounds were beautiful, with a great view of the ocean, inside the house was inappropriately decorated with overgilded furniture, overstuffed couches, and an endless array of knick-knacks. Every available surface was covered with carved ivory elephants and pink quartz pigs and other similar dust magnets. I remembered Lucius’s description of the Kahns’ house as “the Ile St. Louis on Mott Street.”

  “It’s the only house you go to where you have to put your drink down on your lap,” Betty said, referring to the lack of space on any table.

  But it was June’s penchant for nineteenth-century china figurines of monkeys dressed as clowns and jesters that had always been a mystery to me. Her vast collection of costumed simians looked particularly out of place, not to say ridiculous, on the living room mantel of a summer house. But that was our June.

  I remember dear Clara Wilman once told me that the essence of great taste was “the appropriate made supremely comfortable.” By that she meant you didn’t decorate, say, a beach house with marble and gobs of gilt. June rode roughshod over this dictum, for in each of her abodes the inappropriate was made supremely uncomfortable.

  Betty and I knew the house well and when Charlie opened the door for us, we barged right in, said fond hellos, then immediately headed upstairs to June’s bedroom, where Charlie told us she’d been confined on doctor’s orders. We were a bit cautious about entering the room, fearing we would disturb the patient. Betty knocked gently on the door a couple of times and got no answer.

  “Maybe she’s asleep,” I said.

  Betty turned the doorknob slowly and cracked the door so we could peer in. If we had walked into that frilly pink-and-white bedroom expecting to see a woman subdued by her near brush with death, we were sorely mistaken. Far from resting, June was propped up on a hospital bed, barking into the phone, taking notes on the yellow legal pad resting against her knees. Though still pale and thin from her ordeal, she nonetheless seemed quite feisty.

  “Well, that’s just not acceptable!” she was saying as she scribbled furious circles over the notes she’d been taking. “And if you can’t help me, I’ll find someone who can. . . . No, no, no, I will listen to reason. I just won’t listen to you! . . . Because you’re not being reasonable, that’s why! . . . Yes, yes, I understand . . . but you’re a lawyer, for heavens’s sakes! You’re supposed to be amoral! . . . Yes, and the same to you, too! Thank you! Good-bye . . . and good riddance!”

  She hung up the phone and turned to us as if she’d just seen us an hour ago.

  “Well, that was my lawyer,” she announced, still flushed with rage. “Or my ex-lawyer, I should say. Do you know that Carla Cole got into my building! The board voted her in when I was on my deathbed. My deathbed! How dare they?! I intend to sue. And you know what he just had the nerve to tell me? If I sue the board, I’ll be suing myself because I’m the president of the board! He says he can’t handle the case in good conscience. In good conscience! Can you imagine? A lawyer with a conscience?! So I said, ‘Then handle it in bad conscience! Just help me!’ He won’t . . . he refuses . . . silly little man!”

  “So much for our delicate mission,” Betty said in an aside to me.

  “What mission?” June said, overhearing.

  Betty and I gathered around her bed and we both kissed her hello.

  “Junie, it’s so wonderful to see you,” I said.

  “You, too, sweetie. Hi, Betty, dear . . . what mission are you talking about?”

  Betty glanced at me, then said, “Charlie asked us to break the news to you that Carla got into your building.”

  June threw up her hands. “Don’t tell me! I know all about it! In fact, I may call Carla and ask her where I can find a hit man to rub out that rotten old Tut-tut Hadley Grimes! A hit man is just the sort of person she’d know, don’t you think? She’ll probably have hit man parties once she gets started,” June said, only half joking. June thought for a moment, then heaved a great sigh. “Oh, well, I suppose I have to be realistic . . .”

  “It would be a nice change,” Betty muttered under her breath.

  “I heard that, Betty Waterman!” June snapped. “We’re just going to have to start looking for a new apartment. I will not share my lobby with that murderess.”

  When June had first hurled that accusation at Carla, I’d been skeptical. Now I was inclined to agree with her assessment of her new neighbor.

  Colleen brought us up a tray of sandwiches and coffee for lunch. The three of us sat in the bedroom, gossiping. Betty and I filled June in on all that had happened since she had been “out of commission,” as she now liked to put it. She sat there seething as we gave her the blow by blow about Carla’s grand apartment, the famous party, the egregious earring incident, Carla donating the Cole Collection to the Muni, and my resigning from the board. Fresh and juicy as the sliced white champagne peaches that Colleen brought us for dessert, the conglomeration of bad news seemed to completely restore June to both the pitch and color of her old self.

  “This woman must be exposed!” she cried.

  Betty and I wholeheartedly agreed. I told her that Larry Locket was on the case and that was some comfort to both of them.

  “Well, if anyone can get to the bottom of this rotten barrel, it’s Larry,” Betty said.

  I also confessed to them that I was a little afraid of Carla, and I asked June what, exactly, she remembered about being hit by that car.

  “That’s the awful thing,” she said. “I don’t remember anything about it. The last thing I remember is running off that stage when I saw Carla coming up to accept her prize. Charlie tells me they found the car and it was stolen. So I guess we’ll never know who did it.”

  “Maybe not . . . but I have my suspicions,” I said.

  “You think Carla . . . ?” June said.

  “I just find it interesting how she manages to dispose of people who get in her way, that’s all.”

  An hour later, Charlie Kahn said good-bye to us at the door and thanked us profusely for our visit. On the way back to the city, I said to Betty, “Well, it’s good to see Junie getting back to her old self, isn’t it?”

  To which Betty replied, paraphrasing Shakespeare, “ ‘Age cannot wither, nor comas stale her infinite anxiety.’ ”

  Chapter 29

  The travails of the rich being far more fun to contemplate than the real threats of life, the scandal involving Carla and myself became a subject of great speculation, at least in New York. Just how Carla Cole’s four-million-dollar D-flawless diamond earring came to be in my evening bag, whether I’d really taken it or whether it had been planted, Carla’s unorthodox election to the Muni board, and my own abrupt resignation, were ongoing subjects of conversation at the various breakfasts, lunches, and dinners around town. Items about Carla Cole’s party were featured in every gossip column in town, using the egregious earring incident as a peg.

  “Grande Dame Dethroned” was
the way Page Six headlined their article:

  Jo Slater, New York’s reigning queen, is having some trouble hanging onto her tiara these days. At what insiders are calling the “coming out” party of Carla Cole, the wife of still-missing billionaire Russell Cole, Mrs. Slater was caught trying to pocket one of Mrs. Cole’s pricey diamond earrings. The next day, Mrs. Slater tried to block Mrs. Cole’s election to the ultraprestigious board of the Municipal Museum, claiming she’d been framed. In a major upset, however, Mrs. Cole was elected to the board and Justin Howard, the chairman of the museum, repeatedly demanded Mrs. Slater’s resignation. Mrs. Slater refused at first, but then, after a fractious and tense hour, she reluctantly agreed to resign from the board to the relief of all concerned . . .

  When I read this wholly fictitious account of what had happened, my only thought was that accurate reporting, like old-world craftsmanship, was definitely a thing of the past.

  Nous magazine, being a monthly, carried the story sometime later. This was the account of Carla’s party that everyone had been waiting for. To her credit, Miranda Somers was the only one of all her colleagues who failed to mention the earring debacle when describing that infamous evening. Her “Daisy” column concentrated instead on the sumptuousness of the apartment and the guest list. She described everything in detail—from the footmen to the décor to the food, and, of course, what everybody was wearing. She wrote about Carla Cole’s “stunning diamond earrings, the size of plover’s eggs,” mentioning in passing that one had been “accidentally misplaced” during the night, but was later “mercifully recovered in front of the glittering crowd, which glided like gods and goddesses atop the breathtaking lapis lazuli floor, whose golden flecks are sprinkled like fairy dust over a deep blue sea.” Okay, Miranda. I was so grateful she didn’t mention my humiliation and resignation from the Muni board that I forgave her the hyperbole.

  Betty called me to laud Miranda’s restrained coverage.

  “Writing about Carla’s party without mentioning the earring thing is like writing about my daughter’s wedding without mentioning the rain. Miranda’s such a good egg,” Betty said. “If only people like her could write the news. Life would be so sunny and we’d never be troubled by terrorism, plagues, and poverty. Just bad outfits—which is terrorism of a sort, come to think of it.”

  That being the case, I thought, Betty was the Osama bin Laden of fashion.

  Shortly thereafter, Carla Cole flew off to London in her private plane to attend the Taunton Hall Ball, an annual spring event where rich Americans paid dearly to hobnob with English royals and continental aristocrats. By invitation only, the cheapest ticket was five thousand dollars, which only got you to the ball itself, not to the coveted dinner beforehand. Dinner tickets were ten thousand dollars apiece and rumor had it that Carla bought four tables—in Russell’s name—which came to a little less than half a million dollars. The proceeds from the ball went to the Taunton Hall Trust, of which Max Vermilion was the chairman. The purpose of the trust had always been the upkeep of the grand house itself. In recent years, however, in the wake of terrorism, war, famine, disaster, and waning revenues, the trustees started providing scholarships for art and music students, in an attempt to show they were as interested in human beings as they were in gardens, grounds, and furniture.

  Betty, Gil, and Ethan all traipsed off to Los Angeles for the opening of a new museum. They invited me to go along with them up to the Auberge du Soleil, a splendid inn in the Napa Valley, where the three of them always stayed for a couple of weeks in the spring, but I begged off. Betty called me from the inn to tell me that she had just spoken to Trish Bromire, who told her Dick was not going to appeal.

  “Hi-ho, hi-ho, it’s off to jail he goes,” she sang in her inimitable Betty way.

  I was stunned. “You’re kidding!”

  “Nope. Trish told me that Dick did a lot of soul-searching in Southampton.” She paused to reflect. “Soul Searching in Southampton by Dick Bromire. Think that would sell? Just kidding . . . anyway, he’s decided that he wants to get the whole thing over with as soon as possible. His lawyers apparently told him not to waste his money on an appeal. Rather a novel concept for the legal profession—don’t you think?”

  “I know, but why not appeal? What’s he got to lose?”

  “They convinced him that in their opinion there were no grounds for reversible error.”

  “Whatever that means.”

  “It means he’s guilty,” Betty said tersely.

  “Oh.”

  “Plus the fact, he’s watched all these other CEOs stay out on appeal, just marking time until they finally have to go to the slammer. Let’s face it, Jo, is there anything more depressing than trying to make dinner conversation with a man who has a jail term hanging over his head?”

  “You have a point.”

  “It won’t be that long a stretch. A few months max. Trish told me she’s going to get an apartment near the jail, wherever it is, and visit him every day. The only thing she’s worried about is that he might die or get raped. But I don’t think they’ll send him to that kind of prison, do you?”

  “Let’s hope the jail facilitator does his job. How the mighty have fallen, eh, Betts?”

  “Look on the bright side. The fallen are still mighty if they have a lot of money.”

  I hung up thinking what a perfect needlepoint pillow that would make for Dick Bromire.

  Trish called me herself to tell me the news. She said that she and Dick were staying in Southampton to savor Dick’s last few weeks of freedom.

  “Dick’s fate is in the hands of a higher power,” Trish said.

  “Right. The judge.”

  “No,” she said sanctimoniously, “the Judge of judges.”

  Oh, dear. I dreaded to think of Trish Bromire being born again.

  Chapter 30

  It was blackmail payment time again. I traipsed down to David Millstein’s office and picked up my diamonds to send them on, as usual, to that PO box in Las Vegas. This time I debated whether or not to put a note inside the envelope, asking Oliva if she indeed knew Carla Cole, since Carla was always hinting to me they were acquainted and that Oliva had told her about her dealings with me. From the little I knew of my blackmailer, I figured this was a woman who operated on the fringes of both society and the law. If Carla did know her, I thought it might be useful to know exactly how they had become acquainted. Perhaps such knowledge would reveal something unsavory about Carla’s past, something I could use to turn the tables against her for a change. I wrote the note, but at the last minute decided not to send it, mainly because I didn’t want Oliva getting in touch with me for any reason. It was just too risky. I sent the diamonds alone, in an unmarked envelope as usual.

  As I walked up Fifth Avenue, I reflected that I’d acted a bit precipitously by resigning from the Muni board. However, the humiliation of the moment had simply been too much for me to bear. I knew that I’d been cleverly framed by Carla, although I doubted that even she could have predicted such a satisfactory outcome in her favor. Once again, I found myself marginalized in the world over which I had once reigned. The dazzle of Carla’s wealth combined with the newness of her presence blinded people to her true nature. My only recourse now was to discredit and expose her for the scheming predator I believed her to be. For that, I turned to my great ally in this cause, Larry Locket.

  With all my dearest friends out of town, I grew even closer to Larry during this period. Bonded by a common fascination with the Cole case and with Carla herself, we talked on the phone every day and saw each other at least three times a week, either for lunch or dinner. Larry sometimes read me parts of the article he was working on. It was a fascinating, meticulously researched description of the whole drama. But even though Larry and I had our suspicions that Carla had orchestrated Russell’s disappearance, as well as other “accidents,” so far there was no hard evidence against her. I
t was all innuendo, like the lady herself.

  Larry was particularly interested in Carla’s relationship with Max Vermilion.

  “What I can’t figure out is this: is she using Max, or is Max using her?” he said to me on the phone.

  “Maybe both,” I replied. “She wants social acceptance. He wants money for his house. It’s a marriage made in commerce.”

  “Maybe. But Max is a canny old bird, you know. He loves being fawned over, but he likes them to have a little class, don’t you kid yourself. And there are plenty of rich women for him to choose from.”

  “There’s rich and then there’s rich-rich. Not many have six billion dollars at their disposal.”

  “True . . .” Larry said thoughtfully. “She’s over in London now at Max’s ball, you know. Have you ever been, Jo?”

  “No. Have you?”

  “Once. I went because I wanted to see Taunton Hall. It’s not a bad evening of its type, mainly because the setting is so spectacular. But balls for furniture aren’t my thing. Once was enough.”

  “Max seems very fond of Carla, I must say.”

  “Yes, but you know as well as I do that you can never tell what people are really up to when you only see them socially. Everyone’s friendly at a party.”

  “Except Carla Cole’s parties,” I added grimly, thinking of my horrible experience with the earring.

  “Well, that wasn’t a party. That was a declaration of war. The lioness’s den,” he said with a strange little laugh.

  I got the feeling that Larry was frightened of Carla, although he never came right out and said so. I was a little frightened of her, too.