Killer Cocktail

by Sheryl J. Anderson

  “That’s her.”

  Cassady and I wavered, uncertain of the etiquette involved in saying the next thing. I took the plunge. “But you hate her.”

  “Yes, but she has a great house,” Tricia insisted, a little too brightly.

  “Oh, I get it. She’s going away and you’ve bribed the housekeeper to slip you the keys for the weekend,” Cassady said.

  “No. She’s going to be there. The whole family’s going to be there.” Tricia’s smile stretched to the point where I feared it might permanently torque her small face like a bad facelift. “And if you guys don’t come with me, I could very well wind up being the one singing on the dining room table.”

  Cassady shrugged. “Well, I can’t miss that. Count me in.”

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “That’s Molly’s way of saying that she’d love to come, too,” Cassady teased.

  “Well, of course I’d love to, but I don’t get it. If Aunt Cynthia’s doing the whole black sheep thing, why’s the entire family trooping down there and why don’t you just plead heavy workload and not go?”

  Tricia’s smile faltered. “It’s David’s engagement party.”

  The Vincents are a fascinating family. New England bluebloods, super-Republican, the closest thing to aristocracy I’ve ever met. Tricia jokes that her ancestors came over on the advance ship before the Mayflower, to make sure the Colonies were suitable and that everything had been set up properly; planning and controlling are in her blood. Her parents live in Connecticut, but they also keep an apartment in the city because they’re constantly coming in for some function or another. They’ve always been lovely to Cassady and me. Tricia’s crazy about them, but they also make her crazy. Her favorite brother, David, is a case in point. She adores him, would walk out on the president to take a call from him, but David acts first and thinks second and usually calls Tricia to clean up third.

  “They got engaged?” Cassady asked.

  Tricia’s smile disappeared altogether. “Her parents are throwing some huge party in L.A., but Mother and Dad decided to up the ante and throw them a proper engagement party here first. Mother doesn’t think those show people on the Left Coast respect social ritual. But Mother and Dad’s little project turned into a whole weekend that turned into too many people for the house in Connecticut. Obviously, someone didn’t put the scotch away soon enough and got on the phone with Aunt Cynthia, and you guys have to come because I don’t know how I’ll get through it otherwise.” The fingernail of her right index finger dug into the cuticle of her right thumb, Tricia’s classic sign of distress.

  “Of course we’ll be there,” I assured her, taking her hand in mine to stop the digging.

  Then, because it is Cassady’s gift, she said the thing we were all thinking. “He’s really going to marry that bitch?”

  For just a moment, I thought that glow beneath Tricia’s Dresden doll exterior was going to reveal itself to be molten lava and we were going to watch it erupt. But ever the lady, Tricia struggled to keep it all inside and lifted her glass instead. “To my brothers and their god-awful taste in women,” she toasted.

  We clinked glasses in assent. In all the years we’d known Tricia (the three of us met as college freshmen thirteen years ago, but please don’t do the math), David and Richard Vincent had excelled at involvements with nightmarish women. Richard had gone so far as to marry Rebecca Somerset two years ago. Rebecca’s mom was electronics money, her dad was shipping money, and Rebecca was an heiress cum designer cum disaster. She was famous in a large number of nonintersecting social circles for consistently inappropriate and boorish behavior. I’d had the pleasure of seeing her in action at a fund-raiser where she sat next to the Chilean consul’s wife at the head table of a five-k-a-plate banquet, loudly critiqued the poor woman’s dress and jewelry all through dinner—holding up the Chilean consul’s mistress as a paragon of style—then tried to redo her hair during the keynote address.

  After a very public romance, Richard and Rebecca eloped to Jamaica and Tricia’s mother literally took to her bed for a week. Richard and Rebecca had made it a whole thirteen months before splitting up—a full trip around the rocky cape of the calendar so they could ruin every holiday once, was Tricia’s theory—and the Vincent family was still reverberating, six months into the separation.

  And now David was apparently engaged to Lisbet McCandless, one of the few women in America capable of making Rebecca look good by comparison. Lisbet was second-generation Hollywood, the spawn of a movie director and a studio executive, both famous for their tempers and sexual flexibility. Lisbet had been a sitcom star as a child; as a teenager, she drifted into a series of films quickly forgotten despite Lisbet’s willingness to do nudity.

  Now in her twenties, Lisbet had worked her way back on to television, basic cable at least (rumor was, her mother was having an affair with the network executive who ordered the show). She played a rocket scientist who stumbles upon a government cover-up of life on Venus—the only thing that was covered up on the show. It was a huge hit, thanks mainly to the plunging necklines on Lisbet’s costumes, and the success put Lisbet back on top of the tabloid heap. Lately, she’d gotten into so many public brawls with other starlets that her father had shipped her out to do off-Broadway during hiatus as career rehab. David had met her shortly after her arrival in New York and they’d been paparazzi fodder ever since. And now they were engaged.

  I put on my most optimistic expression. “So, your parents are throwing them a huge party. They must be pleased about the whole thing.”

  Tricia scrunched up her face. “Mother’s terrorizing the staff and Dad’s taking way too many meetings. They’re not happy.”

  “Then why the big party?”

  Tricia sighed. “Apparently, Rebecca and Richard have one common belief left, which is that my parents were opposed to their marriage and undermined it from Day One.”

  “Smart parents,” Cassady said.

  “But in their shell shock, Mother and Dad apparently feel that if they make a big show of supporting David and Lisbet, those two won’t be able to accuse them of the same thing when their marriage blows up.” Tricia’s eyes narrowed. “And blow up, it will.”

  “If it’s a big family thing, do you really want us there?” I asked.

  “You’re more family to me than some of the piranhas in my gene pool. Besides, if you don’t come, who will join me as I sit with my bottle of champagne in the corner and sip and snipe?”

  “Sounds like my kind of weekend. Count me in,” Cassady volunteered.

  “Could be fascinating,” I had to admit.

  “Thank you. I feel so much better about going now.” Tricia smiled genuinely and did seem immensely relieved.

  Which is why, that Friday, I was overpacking my overnight bag and wondering when—possibly even, if—I should call Kyle and tell him I was going away He was trying to wrap up a case so I had no expectation of spending the weekend with him. When we’d last spoken, he’d said he didn’t know when we’d be able to get together. So if I called him now and told him I was going away for the weekend, would it seem like I was forcing him to revisit the subject of our going away? I didn’t want to seem punitive. Or worse, clingy.

  Fortunately, I was spared the agony of examining this ethical dilemma by the fact that Kyle chose that moment to call me.

  “Hey.” He said it warmly, but gave me no indication of whether he was standing in the middle of his office or in the middle of a pool of blood. “This a bad time?”

  I opted for the breezy, no-big-deal approach. “No, actually good timing. I’m on my way out. What should I bring you back from Southampton?”

  There was a pause. Brief, but still discernible. The Pause is risky, more for the recipient than for the pauser. Resist all you want, you’re still going to read something into the Pause, a problem that can feed on itself when the pauser realizes he’s paused and starts wondering about what you’re reading into his pause. You’re on one e
nd of the phone, thinking he’s bracing himself to tell you bad news, to get his lie in proper order, to struggle against his desire to declare undying love. And he’s on his end, perhaps doing any one of those things, but maybe just stifling a sneeze or being momentarily distracted by some slut in an exceptionally tight T-shirt and gaudy belly ring.

  Communication is the foundation of any good relationship, God help us.

  “The weekend?”

  I made sure I didn’t pause. “Uh-huh.”

  “Going alone?”

  “Does that affect your request?”

  “Among other things.”

  I liked that answer, and did my best to detect jealousy lurking around the edges. “Tricia’s family’s having a thing and she wants Cassady and me to come along and protect her.”

  “Hazardous duty.”

  “Only for my liver.”

  “One of those weekends.”

  “With any luck.”

  “So you’re hoping to get lucky this weekend?”

  “Ah. You can take the boy out of the interrogation room, but you can’t take the interrogation room out of the boy.”

  “Or evasion out of the girl.”

  “I’m going down to keep Tricia from telling her aunt what she really thinks of her. My sole mission.”

  “Aunt’s a piece of work?”

  “Putting it nicely. You may have heard of her. Cynthia Malinkov.”

  “Any relation to Lev Malinkov, the developer?”

  “Ex, with an emphasis on big alimony.”

  “You’re a good friend.”

  “It’s my only shot at heaven.”

  He laughed. It was a great sound, especially because he didn’t do it very often. I stayed quiet, which I don’t do very often. It didn’t really constitute a Pause, because I was giving him the opportunity to say something in addition to the laugh. I was also realizing that he hadn’t said why he called.

  “You underestimate yourself,” he said, and I could tell he was still smiling.

  “Chronically”

  “Have a great time.”

  “You haven’t answered my question. Or told me why you called.”

  “You sure you didn’t call me?”

  Now I laughed. “Not really.”

  “I don’t want anything. Just call me when you get back.”

  “But why’d you call?”

  “Tell you then. Stay out of trouble.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  He sighed and I knew he was remembering the circumstances of our first meeting. “Try harder.”

  In retrospect, he gets to look all brilliant and psychic, which isn’t entirely fair. Of course, if any of us had realized how the weekend would end, we would have all stayed in Manhattan, even if we did nothing more exciting than sit in my apartment eating cold Chinese takeout and playing cribbage. But life is never that simple. Thankfully.

  2

  Maybe there’s something in the air, something in the water, some magical portal you pass through as you drive out Route 27—but the Hamptons are a different world. And it’s more than the fact that there’s so much accumulated wealth in the area that you smell newly minted money rather than cut grass when the gardeners are at work. It’s beautiful, engaging, and not quite real. Even appalling, soul-numbing traffic on the drive there can’t diminish the beauty once you arrive. The water, the sweeping expanses of green, the jawdropping homes, it’s all pretty amazing.

  Aunt Cynthia lives in Southampton in what Tricia calls a “large house,” which befits Aunt Cynthia, a woman of large reputation and even larger holdings. Apparently, her greatest talent is structuring her own divorce settlements, which she has done four times. I don’t know whether it speaks to how happy the men were before things went south or how happy they were to get out alive once things headed that way that she consistently emerged with the social standing, the friends, and fifty-one percent of the assets. Always leave them taking more, I guess.

  Currently, her massive portfolio included astute real estate holdings, a Broadway show that was actually making money, and underwriting a stepdaughter who’s the hot housewares designer of the moment. According to Tricia, her aunt was deplorably lacking in basic humanity, but she seemed to have a pretty good eye for business.

  Tricia pulled up to the wrought-iron gate at the foot of a driveway that would have run the entire length of the subdivision I grew up in. She poked the button on the intercom and a gruff male voice responded, “Lap dancers are supposed to use the service entrance.”

  “Jokes are supposed to be funny,” Tricia retorted.

  “I must advise you to retreat now, before your troops are fired upon,” another male voice, less rumbly but pleasantly deep, continued.

  “Can’t you guys find something better to play with than the intercom?”

  “Not until you bring Molly and Cassady into the house.”

  “And who’s keeping me from doing that?”

  “It’s Richard’s fault,” the first voice assured her.

  “Everything’s Richard’s fault. Open the gate, Davey.”

  “Did you bring me a present?”

  “I brought you Molly and Cassady.”

  “Excellent. Advance.”

  There was a discreet hum and the great gates swung back with mechanical grace. “My brothers obviously opened the bar early,” Tricia sighed as she drove up to the house.

  Cassady and I declined to comment because we were busy gaping. It was a magnificent Georgian mansion and looked like something out of a British miniseries, one of those gray stone country houses where important people hid during World War II, having tea and rationed milk in between discreet affairs. Tricia parked in front of the massive double front door and hopped out of the car, heading straight for the front steps. Cassady and I scrambled after her and I pointed to the trunk of the car. “Shouldn’t we bring our stuff in?”

  “Nelson will take care of that,” Tricia explained over her shoulder.

  Cassady and I looked at each other in delight. “Nelson,” Cassady repeated.

  “He’ll get the bags,” I returned.

  We managed not to giggle as we followed Tricia inside. Which was just as impressive as the outside and sparkled a great deal more. Tricia introduced us to Nelson, who was less Anthony Hopkins and more Mel Gibson than I’d anticipated. He greeted us with a warm formality and informed Tricia that most of the family was already dressing for dinner since the guests would be arriving soon. When she inquired about her brothers, Nelson rolled his eyes in the most respectful manner possible and said they, too, had gone to dress. He suggested we go up to our rooms and he would bring up our things.

  Cassady watched him as he walked out the front door. “Nice to have a man around the house,” she offered.

  Tricia sighed. “I’d rather not consider all the ways Aunt Cynthia might keep him busy.” She called out for her brothers, but there was no answer, though I swore I heard an echo. Tricia checked her watch and hurried us upstairs where, without benefit of a compass or trail of bread crumbs, she was able to find the room where she always stayed. Cassady and I had been assigned the room next door.

  It was going to be an eclectic mix of people all weekend, which would be a source of entertainment unto itself. The relatives—plus Cassady and I—were staying here, with the rest of the guests scattered around the area at their family manses or friends’ palaces. Most of the guests were David and Lisbet’s social set, but there were friends and associates of Mr. and Mrs. Vincent on hand, as well as some friends of Aunt Cynthia’s whom she told Tricia she’d invited to make sure things stayed interesting.

  Our room was massive and yet welcoming, furnished with pieces to make a museum director drool, and soft, elegant fabrics that made you want to curl up in a wing chair or drape yourself over one of the two double beds, which I did immediately.

  Nelson arrived moments later with our bags and a plump young woman named Marguerite who wore a classic black-and-white maid’s uniform and
carried three flutes of champagne on a silver tray. Nelson and Marguerite left their goodies and withdrew, leaving us to freshen up, toss back the champagne, and slip on our party finery. My Elie Tahari floral silk dress had had the good manners not to wrinkle, so once my Edmundo Castillo black patent sandals were buckled (the huge buckles were what sold me, even more than the three-and-a-half-inch heels), I was ready to go.

  Cassady, on the other hand, uncharacteristically chose to fuss with her hair. “Most people go out of town to let their hair down,” I pointed out as Cassady piled her auburn locks on top of her head.

  Tricia stood near the door, wearing a Dolce & Gabbana fitted paisley dress, draining her champagne and trying not to tap her Ashley Dearborn–framed toes. “Cassady, you’re more stunning than mortal eye can bear. Let’s go.”

  Cassady pursed her lips at her reflection in the bureau mirror. She was wearing a strapless Stella McCartney and looked fabulous, of course. “I just want to make a good impression. For your sake, Tricia.”

  “Gild by association?” I had to ask.

  Tricia walked over and tugged on the front of Cassady’s dress. “Sweetheart, no one’s going to realize you even have a head. Aunt Cynthia likes punctuality. Let’s go.”

  We followed Tricia through another maze of gently illuminated hallway, down a staircase wide enough for the Giants offensive line to descend in formation, and out to the backyard. I doubt, though, they use that word in Southampton. The south lawn, perhaps. The back forty. The adjacent county, even.

  On the vivid expanse of lawn there was a gently billowing tent lit by gauzy globes. Within the tent, people were finding their way to their tables while waitresses of the aspiring model/actress/trophy wife variety stood off to the side, ready to serve. This was evidence of Cassady’s theory that the Hamptons are the only true example of trickledown economics: All the excess cash in Manhattan has trickled down to the Hamptons where it then trickles down to all the waitresses and lifeguards and dog walkers who pool that cash to move to … Manhattan.