People Like Us

by Dominick Dunne

  “We have a mutual friend,” replied Bernie.

  “Who?”

  “Ms. Myra.”

  “Ah,” said Gus, nodding. “Nice lady.”

  The two men smiled at each other.

  “And knows some nice ladies,” answered Bernie. “Perfect for this interim period of my life.”

  “That’s your low profile?”

  Bernie nodded. “Ms. Myra told me you had a nifty place.”

  “On the other hand, Matilda Clarke says it’s just the right degree of shabby,” replied Gus.

  “That’s supposed to be a compliment, I guess,” said Bernie.

  “Absolutely. You’re supposed to say thank you.”

  “I see.” They both laughed.

  “What a bunch they all are,” said Gus.

  “What a bunch.”

  Bernie got up and looked at the books in the bookcases. “Do you read all these books, Gus?”

  “Most of them.”

  “I ran into Juanito Perez recently at a restaurant in the Village,” said Bernie, picking up a book. “He’s a rich guy now.”

  “According to Dodo, it kills Lil that Juanito got Hubie’s money. She wanted to sue, but Uncle Laurance said the publicity would be terrible for the family.”

  “Did you go to Hubie’s funeral?” asked Bernie.

  “Yeah.”

  “I hear they didn’t let Juanito come back to the house.”

  “True.”

  “Did you know that Lil brought fifty Seconals to Hubie on the one time she visited him in the hospital?”

  “No, I didn’t know that,” said Gus.

  “True. Left them in a bag of books from the Wilton House Book Shop. Juanito told me that. Juanito flushed them down the toilet.”

  “Jesus,” said Gus. “Lil and Laurance still pretend Hubie didn’t die of AIDS, and they expect you to believe them.”

  “The Van Degans are a tough bunch,” said Bernie.

  “They’re all tough, those people,” replied Gus.

  “The Bradleys’ cook jumped out a window on the day of my wedding, right around the corner from the Colony Club, and the Bradleys still came to the reception. Yvonne Lupescu shot Constantine de Rham in the stomach that day and crashed my wedding reception and caught Justine’s bouquet.” Bernie made a gesture that indicated madness.

  “A workman fell out of a cherry picker raising a weeping willow tree up to the Renthals’ apartment on the day of their ball, and the ball went on like nothing happened, after Elias paid off the workman’s family,” said Gus, carrying on Bernie’s theme. “Ormonde Van Degan died at the ball, and they stashed his body on a pool table so as not to spoil the First Lady’s entrance.”

  “There’s a strong indifference to death around that group,” said Bernie.

  “There’s a strong indifference to death everywhere, Bernie,” said Gus.

  “What’s your story, Gus? There’s more to you than this quiet guy whom everybody talks to. Some people say there’s a mystery about you.”

  “There’s no mystery about me, Bernie. It’s just that no one ever asks me about me, and I don’t volunteer.”

  “I’m asking you now.”

  “A creep came along and killed my daughter.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “I don’t go around broadcasting it, but it’s why I moved here. To sit out the three years of the creep’s sentence.”

  “And then what are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to go back to where I came from.”

  “And do what?”

  “I’m going to kill the guy who killed my daughter.”

  “Come on.”

  “I am.”

  Bernie looked at Gus, and Gus met his stare.

  “I’m going to make me another one of these,” said Bernie, holding up his whiskey glass.

  “I’m going to call out his name. I’m going to say, ‘Hey, Lefty,’ ” said Gus. “I want him to be looking at me at the moment. I want him to know it was me who did it.”

  Bernie, in the door of the kitchen, stared at Gus, not knowing whether or not he was being serious. “And then what’ll happen?”

  “Prison, I suppose.”

  “Prison?”

  “Maybe that’s when I’ll have the time to write that book Ezzie Fenwick tells people I’m going to write,” said Gus.

  Bernie walked over to where Gus was sitting. “Gus,” he said.

  “What?”

  “You don’t really mean any of this, do you?”

  Gus looked at Bernie for a minute and then smiled. “No, of course not,” he said.

  40

  Poor Hubie, people always said about Hubie Altemus, in remembrance, but his memory was already fading.

  On several occasions Juanito Perez had tried to contact Lil after Hubie’s funeral, once by telephone, on the butler’s day off, when Lourdes had answered the telephone and hissed into the receiver in a torrent of Spanish that Juanito was not to call back at la Señora Altemus’s house ever, or she, Lourdes, would tell her brother Duarte in Puerto Rico that his son was a puto. After that, Juanito wrote Lil on two occasions, but each time his letter to her was returned by Lil’s lawyers, unopened.

  “Isn’t it marvelous the way Lil has handled the whole thing,” people like Ezzie Fenwick and Matilda Clarke and Cora Mandell said about Lil Altemus, whenever anyone spoke about Hubie’s death. They were referring to what her close friends called Lil’s bravery in the face of tragedy. However, in the bosom of her family, those closest to Lil, like her daughter, Justine, her sister-in-law, Janet, her stepmother, Dodo, and her maid, Lourdes, knew that her grief, if grief it was, had taken on another form, an abiding hatred for Juanito Perez, whom she blamed for her son’s death.

  Sometimes in the night Lil would awaken from her sleep and remember family possessions she had given Hubie, that she hadn’t thought about for years, that were now in the possession of Juanito Perez, and each time she would feel an anger so intense against Juanito that she began to have heart palpitations. She became obsessed over the set of twelve Charles X chairs from the house in Newport, that she had never cared for, that Aunt Minnie Willoughby had given Hubert and her when they were married, and that Lil had taken out of storage and given Hubie when he set up his own establishment. It mattered to her more than anything in the world that those twelve chairs be returned to the family, as though honor was at stake, although Justine didn’t want them, and Lil had no room for them, even if she had cared for them.

  Lil had not forgotten, although she had never mentioned it, that her stepmother Dodo had offered Juanito a seat in her pew at Hubie’s funeral, nor that Juanito had asked about Dodo when she met him in the hospital at Hubie’s bedside, so she asked Dodo to go to handle the task of retrieving the twelve Charles X chairs from the despicable Mr. Perez. Dodo, who had been left independently rich by Ormonde, no longer did the family’s bidding, as she had done for years when she was a poor relation, and flatly refused the commission. “I wouldn’t dream of doing such a thing,” Dodo said, in one of her increasing shows of independence.

  When her mother asked Justine to undertake the task she refused. Then she added that she would have nothing to do with such an unappealing task even if she were not pregnant. Lourdes, Lil’s maid who listened to everything that went on in the family, had never told Mrs. Altemus that Juanito Perez was the son of her brother Duarte in Puerto Rico. She was glad she had not confessed to the relationship, as she knew that she would have been assigned the unpleasant task of getting back the chairs.

  It was Ezzie Fenwick, whom Lil had taken into her confidence, over lunch at Clarence’s, who suggested that the perfect person to arrange for the return of the chairs was Jamesey Crocus. As everyone knew, Jamesey Crocus was thought to know more about fine furniture than any man in New York and had lately served as private curator to Elias and Ruby Renthal during their period of acquisition. Jamesey, on his part, liked nothing better than to be sent on furniture forays for families l
ike the Van Degans and the Altemuses, which always resulted in increased intimacies with the grand families and invitations to even their small dinner parties.

  Jamesey Crocus, getting out of the cab in SoHo, looked in each direction before entering Juanito Perez’s building, in the manner he often adopted late at night when, after he had returned a fashionable dowager to her uptown address, he entered a low haunt in a different part of town that he did not wish to be spotted going into, for fear of lascivious stories being circulated about him. Buzzed in by an intercom, he walked up three flights of stairs after a sign on the self-service elevator informed him it was out of commission. Juanito was standing in the open door of the loft that had once belonged to Hubie Altemus. Instantly, Jamesey, who had known Juanito before Hubie knew him, was struck by the change in his appearance. Although he was dressed casually, he was wearing a tweed jacket of excellent cut that Jamesey recognized as having been one of Hubie Altemus’s and a blue shirt with a button-down collar open at the neck, in the manner that Hubie had always dressed. Jamesey looked at Juanito the way he had once looked at Ruby Renthal’s console tables. Having money had eliminated from Juanito’s face an expression that suggested furtiveness of character, a consequence of his extreme underprivilege, and replaced it with a look that brought out his good qualities. Only a cigarette hanging insolently from the corner of his mouth made him resemble the Juanito he had once known. For an instant they stared at each other.

  “Very bad for you, smoking,” said Jamesey, as a greeting.

  “Don’t see her for two years, and the first thing she says is, ‘Very bad for you, smoking,’ ” replied Juanito, as if he were repeating this story to an audience. “Come in, Janie.”

  More than anything in the world, Jamesey Crocus, who moved in the finest circles, hated to be called Janie, but he said nothing. Inside, he looked around. The loft was, like Hubie, a combination of a life he left behind, but not completely, and a life he aspired to, but into which he never quite fit. A fire, going low, took the chill off the large room.

  “How charming this is, Juanito,” said Jamesey.

  “I’ve kept everything just the same way Hubie had it,” said Juanito.

  “Oh, yes, of course,” said Jamesey, who took this statement with a grain of salt. He had known Juanito to be promiscuous and notoriously unfaithful and doubted the sincerity of his maintenance of Hubie’s home as a shrine. Jamesey expected Juanito to offer him a drink, so that time could be spent in friendly conversation before getting down to the purpose of the visit.

  But Juanito did not offer him a drink. “To what do I owe the pleasure of this visit, Janie?” he asked.

  “Mrs. Altemus, Lil, asked me if I would talk to you about some chairs that were left to you, a set of Charles the Tenth chairs,” said Jamesey.

  Juanito had not forgotten that his letters to Lil Altemus had been returned by her lawyers, unopened, a snub that still riled him. “Those, you mean?” he asked, pointing over to the dining-room area. Around the table were eight of the chairs. Two more were in a group of furniture by the fireplace. One was at a desk. The twelfth was by a telephone table.

  Jamesey peered ecstatically through his owlish spectacles at the magnificent chairs. Clasping his hands before his stomach, he breathed heavily in the manner that he always breathed when he looked upon a rare and beautiful object. “Oh, my dear, how perfectly gorgeous,” he whispered, breaking his own rule never to allow a possible seller to think that his wares were too valuable. “Charles the Tenth,” he said, in his instructor’s voice, as if he were giving a lecture on furniture at the museum, “was the younger brother of Louis the Sixteenth, who, as you know, was beheaded during the Revolution. During his reign—”

  “Whatever it is you’re up to, Janie, it’s not in my favor. That much I know,” said Juanito, interrupting a history lesson in which he had no interest.

  “Don’t call me Janie,” said Jamesey, through clenched teeth.

  “Too familiar? Is that it? Am I overstepping? Excuse me, Miss Crocus. Is that better?”

  Jamesey decided to let it pass. The possibility of an association with the Altemus—Van Degan clans was too attractive for him to risk spoiling it by becoming irritated with a man he still considered to be no more than a hustler. “You see, Juanito,” he said, in a friendly tone, “the chairs belonged to Aunt Minnie Willoughby, and she gave them to Lil, and Lil gave them to Hubie, but Aunt Minnie always wanted them to stay in the family, as heirlooms.”

  “Aunt Minnie Willoughby,” said Juanito, in an exaggerated pose of pensiveness. “Wasn’t she the dyke?”

  “Oh, no, no, that was Aunt Grace Gardiner,” said Jamesey.

  “I never could get Hubie’s family straight.”

  Jamesey, who understood the genealogy of all the best families in New York, said, “Aunt Minnie Willoughby was on the Altemus side, and Aunt Grace Gardiner, who indeed was a dyke, now that I come to think of it, was on the Van Degan side.”

  “I really don’t give a shit,” said Juanito. “Now, what are you here for?”

  “Mrs. Altemus wondered—”

  “You can call her Lil,” said Juanito.

  “Lil, of course. Lil wondered if you would give the chairs back to the family.”

  “Have you told Lil that you’re the one who introduced me to Hubie?”

  Jamesey paused. “No, no, I haven’t.”

  “I wonder if she’d still send you as her emissary if she was aware of that fact.”

  “I’m sure that if money was the issue, Mrs. Altemus would buy the chairs back from you,” said Jamesey, evading the turn the conversation was taking.

  “You forget, Janie. I got more money than I could ever spend.”

  “It’s quite chilly in here,” said Jamesey.

  “Hard to heat these big lofts in these old buildings. That’s why I keep a fire going. Let me build up the fire,” he said. Juanito walked over to the fireplace. “Remember the time you paid me by check, and it bounced?”

  “I made that check good,” said Jamesey, indignantly.

  “Only after I threatened to black your eye on your way to Adele Harcourt’s book club,” said Juanito. “Shit, I’m all out of firewood.” He picked up one of the Charles X chairs, turned it over, and broke off one of the legs.

  “Juanito!” screamed Jamesey, as Juanito fed the chair leg into the fire and then broke off another leg.

  “What’s the matter? There’s eleven left,” he said.

  “Those chairs are priceless. Were priceless, I mean.”

  “Now you tell Lil for me, when you report that you failed in your mission, that if she had bothered to speak civilly to me in the hospital when Hubie was dying, or if she had offered me a seat in the church at Hubie’s funeral, or if she’d asked me back to the house after the funeral with all the other mourners, or if her fucking lawyers hadn’t returned my letters to her unopened, in which I offered to return these family heirlooms which I inherited, I would have given them back to her, but now I won’t. Get lost, Jamesey, and stay lost.”

  41

  At the end of summer, the Elias Renthals returned to New York. Ever since details of Elias’s corrupt stock-trading practices were revealed to his stunned colleagues in the financial world, as well as to the public at large, Renthal, a man once celebrated for his financial acumen, was now reviled by many as a symbol of Wall Street greed. Those who had not been invited to the Renthals’ ball now let it be known that they had declined the invitation, as if they had advance knowledge of the financier’s dubious behavior and chose, for ethical reasons, to absent themselves from what was now referred to as a vulgar spectacle. No one had a word to say in Elias Renthal’s favor, or a doubt of his guilt.

  At the museum there was a collective sigh of relief that the board of directors had stuck to its guns and not made Elias a member, even after his pledge of many millions of dollars for the construction of a new wing, and persuasive arguments on his behalf by some of its most conservative members like Laurance
Van Degan and Addison Cheney. At the time an alternate proposal had been forwarded, before the financial scandal, of course, that Ruby Renthal join the board instead of Elias, as her elegance was thought to be more acceptable to the membership than the still-rough-around-the-edges Elias. That plan, too, had now been dropped.

  To see Elias Renthal, however, in the weeks following his return, was not to see a crushed man. His business routines were followed the same as before, and, as was his practice, he continued to arrive at his office as early as six o’clock in the morning. He pored over financial publications, annual reports, and trade digests as avidly as ever, looking for investment ideas for his analysts to check out for him. His manner, which could be abrasive with subordinates who were not as quick as he in understanding market practices, remained as abrasive as ever. All of this was carried on with a sort of nonchalant attitude that belied the fact that investigators from the Securities and Exchange Commission were packing his files in cartons at the same time.

  Nor was there any lessening of attentiveness in his manner of dress. He continued to order his suits, twenty at a time, from Mr. Sills, and his shirts and shoes from his shirtmaker and shoemaker in London, as if to show that all was right with his world, although there were those who wondered if he would not be in prison, in Allenwood, where his kind of felons were sent, by the time his suits and shirts and shoes, all of which took time, would be delivered to him.

  It was not until after the taping incident, on a legally wired pay telephone in the office of the United States Attorney, that anyone made the connection between Byron Macumber’s suicide the previous month and Elias Renthal. While Elias was still sailing the Mediterranean, an arrangement had been made between his lawyers and the office of the Attorney General to cooperate with their ongoing investigation by furnishing them with the names of his confreres in malfeasance.

  When Elias walked into the Butterfield for the first time after his return from Europe, he did not notice that the usually affable Jasper, at the desk in the front hall where members signed in their guests, did not return his greeting. Walking up the curved marble stairway, which he had planned to copy for the new stairway at Merry Hill, he passed Sims Lord descending at the same time. At the moment of passing, Sims Lord gave no indication that he realized another person was within inches of him on the stairway. In the bar, where nearly every table was occupied with groups of two, three, and four, a pleasant buzz of conversation filled the air as members, recently returned from summer holidays, were happily greeting each other anew and ordering drinks and lunch from the excellent kitchen, which boasted of serving the best food of any club in the city. But, on the entrance of Elias Renthal into the lovely paneled room, a silence rose that was almost audible as each person looked up at the stout man standing in the doorway. There were many in the room whom he knew, from the club, from business, and from society. He had dined with many of them at their houses, both in town and in the country, and many he had entertained himself, some as recently as at his famous ball at the end of the spring season. No one rose to speak to him, and he was aware that he must bear their cold looks and silence without seeming to notice them.