People Like Us

by Dominick Dunne

  Reza, in order to escape any unfavorable or even scandalous publicity, agreed to pay Constantine de Rham a sizable amount, after Constantine threatened to go to the police to tell them of Yvonne’s part in his near fatal shooting.

  Yvonne laughed and laughed. “It is simply this mad person’s imagination, my darling,” she said to Reza. “There is no truth whatever to what he says.” However, she did not discourage her new fiancé from making his settlement on Constantine.

  Reza’s toupee was now gone. “I adore bald men,” Yvonne told him. His teeth were now capped, also at the suggestion of his bride. Gone, too, were his black suits, replaced by smarter clothes made up in haste by Mr. Sills. Prodded by Yvonne, Reza made his offer for the Elias Renthal apartment, as soon as Ruby put it on the market, with a view to establishing himself and his new wife as top-flight social figures in the city.

  “Look, Reza, we won’t even have to change the drapes,” said Yvonne, fingering the persimmon damask curtains of the drawing room, as if to prove to him early on that she was a woman who knew how to economize.

  “Mrs. Renthal has marvelous taste,” interjected Helene Whitbeck, the real-estate broker, who was showing the apartment.

  Yvonne sniffed. “Ruby Renthal doesn’t mean anything socially anymore,” she replied.

  The Bulbenkian purchase of the Renthal apartment came to naught however. The cooperative board of the exclusive building, embarrassed by the publicity brought on by Elias Renthal’s financial disgrace, let it be known that the Bulbenkians would be turned down by the board if they should apply. Florian Gray printed in his column that the Bulbenkians had been turned down by the building.

  “We’ll sue,” screamed Yvonne.

  “Sue,” replied Mrs. Sims Lord, who was the president of the co-op board and known to be fearless in her dealings with upstarts. It became known among the sort of real-estate brokers who dealt in dwellings for the very rich that the board wanted only people like themselves to live in that building from now on and had even voted to break up the enormous apartment into three smaller apartments, which people with lesser fortunes but more breeding than the Renthals and the Bulbenkians could afford. Or, as Mrs. Sims Lord said at a dinner that very night at Lil Altemus’s, “We’ve had quite enough of the billionaires, thank you very much.” To which Lil Altemus replied, “Hear, hear.”

  Undeterred by the rebuff, Bulbenkian purchased a house of embassy proportions that had long been shuttered on Park Avenue.

  The crowds turned out in record number for the three-day viewing that preceded the auction of the four thousand lots that made up the contents of the Elias Renthals’ forty-one-room apartment on three floors that they had purchased from the estate of the late social figure Sweetzer Clarke. So great was the public interest in the magnificent possessions of the convicted financier and his elegant wife that lines formed around the block of the auction house on York Avenue, and people waited for as long as three hours to simply march by the treasures, while guards admonished them to keep moving so everyone would have a turn before closing time. The New York Times said, in its front-page coverage of the event, “The Renthals collected it all in record time. Now they will dispose of it in even less time.”

  Antiques dealers, private curators and museum curators, and collectors of eighteenth-century French and English furniture arrived in New York from London, Paris, and Tokyo for what had come to be known as the Renthal sale, in the way that their ball had come to be known as the Renthal ball. At night various charities took over the showrooms, and the rich of the city, unwilling to wait in line with the hoi polloi, paid hundreds of dollars each to view what the poor could see for free, with the certain knowledge that their admittance fee was going for a good cause. Ruby Renthal, who had become reclusive, declined to be present at any of the charity events.

  “Oh, please, Ruby, come,” begged Maude Hoare, who was chairperson for the evening benefiting the Hospital for Plastic Surgery.

  “I can’t. I’m sorry,” said Ruby.

  “You’d be an extra added attraction for the evening,” said Violet Bastedo, who was chairperson for the evening benefiting Ballerina House, a home for indigent dancers.

  “I’m sorry,” said Ruby.

  “Damn her,” they both said later.

  “Oh!” said Lil Altemus, covering her face with her catalogue, as she and Ezzie Fenwick jockeyed for position in front of Elias Renthal’s pool table that had once belonged to Edward VII.

  “What’s the matter, Lil?” asked Ezzie.

  “Daddy died on that pool table,” Lil said, touching the faded green felt on which Ormonde Van Degan had expired on the night of the Renthal ball.

  “Oh, right,” answered Ezzie, whose eyes were eagerly scanning the crowd for people to wave to. He did not wish to be reminded that Lil and her stepmother Dodo had walked in on him passing information that Elias Renthal was under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission to the gossip columnist Florian Gray at almost the same moment that Lil had discovered her father dead on the pool table.

  “Look, Ezzie, aren’t those the console tables that Ruby gave to the White House?” asked Lil Altemus. “Over there. With the rams’ heads.”

  “They were returned to the Renthals by the White House,” answered Ezzie.

  “Because of the scandal, you mean?”

  “Because they were inauthentic.”

  “No!”

  “Yes. Jamesey told me.”

  They exchanged looks, as if to say, “What can you expect, from people like that?”

  At the last moment, the auction was canceled. Reza Bulbenkian made an offer for the entire contents of the vast apartment. At a hastily called meeting between the auction house and Ruby Renthal, the decision was made to accept Reza Bulbenkian’s offer. The auction house felt that the enormous offer made by the financier could very well be in excess of the profits from an auction of the possessions of a disgraced figure, and Ruby Renthal felt that it would halt the avalanche of publicity connected with the sale that put her name and photograph in the newspapers every day.

  “How did you manage to halt the auction?” a reporter asked Reza Bulbenkian, at the news conference set up by the auction house and Reza to announce that the sale had been canceled.

  “You can buy anything you pay too much for,” said Reza, nodding his head, like a wise sage of finance.

  The antiques dealers who had traveled to New York from around the globe for the sale hissed and booed the decision.

  “I am so happy with Reza,” said Yvonne Lupescu at the news conference, linking her arm in his and smiling up at him, as if saving the day. Unlike Ruby Renthal, Yvonne had no desire whatsoever to shun the press. She waved to the cameras. On her finger was a diamond the size of the diamond that Ruby had dropped into the Mediterranean. “Reza is the man I have been waiting for all my life.” They hoped, she said, to be able to start entertaining in their new home in two weeks.

  To her hairdresser, in private, she added, “He’s rich. He doesn’t drink and, thank heaven, he doesn’t want to be beaten.”

  47

  In prison, it hurt Elias Renthal when he heard that his apartment had been sold, even though Ruby had told him on the way to prison that she didn’t want to live there anymore. The apartment represented everything that he had ever strived for in his life, and he had always enjoyed the astonished looks on the faces of even the most established and wealthy visitors when he showed them through it. It hurt him even more when he heard that it was being divided up into three smaller apartments, making it forever irretrievable and squashing the daydreams he sometimes indulged in of resuming his former life after his release from Allenwood, a better and wiser man.

  It enraged him that Reza Bulbenkian and his new wife, the former Yvonne Lupescu, should have purchased all the furniture and paintings that he and Ruby had collected so lovingly and that they were already starting to entertain on a lavish scale in their new mansion on Park Avenue, rivaling the life-style that the
Renthals had made famous. Elias loathed Reza Bulbenkian and told his three bridge companions of crooked things that he knew Reza had done in business and gotten away with. Then he added, “so far,” meaning that his practices would eventually catch up with him, too. The congressman, the rock-and-roll executive, and the cement-company owner laughed. They loved hearing Elias’s stories. Elias also told them that Yvonne Bulbenkian used to be one of Ms. Myra’s girls, before she took up with Constantine de Rham, and carried her whips in a custom-made Vuitton case. “Imagine, a former hooker running New York society,” he said.

  Most of all Elias missed Ruby. More than anything in the world, he wanted to make it up to Ruby for the embarrassment and the ostracism that he had caused her. He never remembered her as she was when he first met her, a pretty stewardess with a sassy manner. He thought of her coming down the stairway of their apartment on the night of their ball, dressed in white and wearing all her diamonds, and marveled each time he thought of her as the great lady she had become.

  “Max comes to visit,” Elias said to Ruby one day when she drove up from Merry Hill to see him.

  “Good old Max,” said Ruby.

  “Max saw Loelia Manchester at the opera.”

  “Max at the opera? What next?” replied Ruby.

  “He said he thought Loelia was unhappy.”

  “Heavens,” said Ruby.

  From the time of her arrival, Elias knew there was something on Ruby’s mind, all during the time they were talking of other things, like Max Luby and Loelia Manchester.

  “Elias,” said Ruby, finally. “There’s something I have to tell you.”

  “What’s that, Ruby darling? Anything you want. Anything.”

  Then Ruby asked Elias for a divorce. She brought with her the papers for him to sign. Elias was devastated by Ruby’s request but was not totally surprised. The congressman’s wife had divorced him. The wife of the head of the record company had divorced him. The head of the cement company was already divorced. His hand shaking, he signed the papers.

  “At least you didn’t break the news to me through a lawyer,” he said.

  “You know I’d never do that to you, Elias,” she answered.

  “My friend the congressman read about his wife’s divorce in the newspaper.”

  “Or that.”

  “I’ll miss you.”

  “I know.”

  “Don’t remember me badly.”

  “I won’t. Count on that.” Ruby took out a handkerchief from her bag and wiped a tear from her eye. Then she began gathering up her things and put the papers he signed into her bag.

  “Well, good-bye,” she said, rising at the end of the visit.

  “We’re allowed to kiss,” said Elias.

  “Oh, yes, of course.” She smiled. As he leaned toward her, she averted her face a fraction of an inch so that his kiss landed on the side of her mouth rather than full on her lips, like a son at boarding school saying good-bye to a departing mother. Elias understood. Each avoided the other’s eye. For a few moments they simply stood there.

  “I read in Dolly’s column that Loelia married Mickie,” said Elias, wanting to forestall her departure.

  Ruby nodded. “I read that,” she answered.

  “What do they call her now, Loelia Minardos?”

  “Apparently.”

  “Don’t sound so snappy as Loelia Manchester.”

  “I suppose not.”

  “You don’t see Loelia?”

  “No.”

  Elias nodded. “I wonder if she paid Ned all that money he was asking.”

  “No,” said Ruby.

  “How come?”

  “Ned would never have taken money from Loelia. It was just to keep her from marrying Mickie that he asked for all that money. Now he doesn’t care.”

  “How do you know?”

  “That’s what I heard.”

  Lord Biedermeier visited Elias in prison and reported at a dinner party later that same evening, at Maisie Verdurin’s house, that Elias had wept when he talked about the divorce. Feelings against Elias still ran high, and the consensus was that Ruby Renthal had done the correct thing.

  “Ruby just dropped out of sight,” said Maude Hoare. “I don’t know a soul who sees her.”

  “Poor Ruby,” said Aline Royceton.

  “But why in the world did you go to visit Elias?” asked Maisie.

  “Oh, I was always fond of Elias,” replied Lord Biedermeier.

  Lord Biedermeier did not say to the group at his table that he was hopeful of securing a second book from Elias, on the prison life of a billionaire, even promising him someone willing to make weekly visits to Allenwood to ghost-write it for him.

  “A sort of De Profundis,” Lord Biedermeier had said to Elias in the visitors’ room, shifting his position to see him better through the mesh screening that separated them.

  “A sort of what?” asked Elias.

  “De Profundis. De Profundis,” Lord Biedermeier said, clapping his hands in mock exasperation, as if everyone in prison would know about Oscar Wilde’s final prose written during his incarceration. “Listen to this, Elias,” he said, quoting, loosely, from Wilde’s letter to Lord Alfred Douglas, that Lord Biedermeier had jotted down on the back of an envelope in the limousine on his way to the prison in Pennsylvania. “ ‘I have disgraced my name eternally.’ ” Lord Biedermeier gestured toward Elias to show that he, too, had disgraced his name eternally. “ ‘I have made it a low byword among low people. I have dragged it through the very mire, and turned it into a synonym for folly.’ You see Elias, you could change folly to greed.”

  But Elias Renthal, whose name had indeed become a synonym for greed, could not think of De Profundis that day. Elias Renthal could only think that he had lost Ruby Renthal forever. He could only look blankly at Lord Biedermeier.

  “Keep a journal, Elias. Write everything down, the day-to-day of what happens here. Get to know the most serious offenders. What a book it will make!” He clapped his hands, and his pince-nez fell off. “Start reading the Bible every day. You know the sort of thing, I-found-God-in-Allenwood. The public will eat it up, and everyone will be on your side by the time you get out. There’s a whole great big life waiting for you out there. Oh, perhaps not with the Van Degans and that set, but there’s other fish to fry in life than Laurance Van Degan who, by the way, in case you hadn’t heard, had to resign as president of the Butterfield.”

  Elias looked up. “Because of me?” he asked.

  “Apparently,” replied Lord Biedermeier.

  “Holy shit.”

  48

  Gus moved into a hotel in Hollywood. He read books he had always meant to read. He watched videos of films he had wanted to see, but missed. He called none of his friends from the years he had lived in Hollywood, when he worked in films, and he did not frequent any of the restaurants where he was likely to run into people he knew. Several times a day he drove by the apartment complex in West Hollywood that blocked 1342¼ South Reeves from view from the street, but he never got out of his car. Every day he stopped in to see Peach, usually late in the afternoon. Every few days he went to the cemetery where Becky was buried and lay a rose from Peach’s garden on her grave. Peach watched her former husband and worried that he might be having a nervous breakdown.

  “He’s out,” Gus said one day, when they were staring at one of the afternoon soap operas that Peach always watched. He had come into her room and sat on the edge of the bed for twenty minutes before he said a word.

  Peach didn’t say, “Who’s out?” even though they had not mentioned Lefty Flint’s name since Gus returned to California.

  “How do you know?” she asked instead.

  “I just know.”

  “Did your private detective tell you?”

  “He wasn’t a private detective.”

  “I know he wasn’t a private detective.”

  “I fired him.”

  “Then how do you know? Vacaville doesn’t send out announcements.
”

  “I saw him.”

  “You saw Lefty?” she asked. Peach looked at the back of his head. She picked up the tuner and turned off the television set.

  “Where?”

  “Carrying groceries out of Stop and Shop.”

  “Did he see you?”

  “No.”

  “Was he alone?”

  “No. Marguerite what’s-her-name was with him. The bartender.”

  “Don’t make me pull it out of you line by line, Gus. Tell me everything.”

  “They were laughing. They were enjoying themselves. I can’t stand it that he should be happy, after what he did.”

  “Where did they go?”

  “He has an apartment at 1342¼ South Reeves in West Hollywood. They went there.”

  Peach picked up a magazine from the bed. “Of all the cities in this country, why did he have to come back here where it happened?”

  “Sometimes I wonder why we were never searched all through the trial when we went into the courtroom,” said Gus. “It would have been so easy.”

  “What would have been so easy?” asked Peach.

  With his forefinger and thumb, he imagined his Luger in his hand. He pulled his trigger finger and fired, making a pow sound with his lips at the same time. In his mind, his bullet hit its target.

  Peach stared at him. Then she leaned over and picked up the telephone. “I’m going to call Detective Johnston,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “I know that son of a bitch is going to come here. I know it. I’ve known it ever since he wrote me that letter from prison. I want them to put a guard on my house.”

  “He won’t come here, Peach. I guarantee you that.”

  By the end of the first week, Gus had gotten the movements of Lefty Flint down. He knew the time of day Lefty Flint rose. He knew the diner where he had breakfast. He knew the laundromat where he took his washing. He knew he marketed at the Stop and Shop for only one day’s provisions at a time, as if he were a temporary visitor. After lunch he drove Marguerite to her bar in Studio City and left her there. Sometimes in the afternoon he went to a film. He stayed by himself most of the time. At seven he went to the bar again and took Marguerite out to an early dinner at a restaurant near the bar. After dinner, he went to work as night bartender and stayed on duty until closing time. Marguerite often left between ten and eleven, either taking a cab home or getting a lift from someone she knew, but it was usually about two, after the glasses were washed and the tables stacked and the trash put out and the waiters paid, before Lefty Flint locked up and left the bar by the back entrance. There was a space by the trash cans where he parked Marguerite’s Nile-green Toyota. Gus had twice tried the doors of the car, but they were locked. He had tried hiding himself behind the trash cans, but once he accidentally knocked one over. Afraid that the sound would attract attention, he had retreated to the street and walked away as fast as he could.