The Gods of Greenwich

by Norb Vonnegut

  When the family moved to Connecticut, it was her decision to embrace the demanding schedule of a Greenwich housewife: Pilates before breakfast to keep husband’s interest; children off to Greenwich Country Day no later than seven-thirty; Starbucks grapevine afterward, hold the chocolate cake doughnuts; shopping at Patricia Gourlay Fine Lingerie to strut trim figure and low-fat diet to husband; and a $49.95 lunch consisting of three-bean salad and white wine with other moms before picking up the kids.

  Or maybe Bianca played the game for reasons other than choice. Maybe she capitulated to the incessant pressure from Cy. “Look, Bianca, appearance is everything in my biz. I can’t have you disappearing into your hole ten hours a day to write books. Your job is to be dumb, dark, and decorative.”

  Their problems escalated with the twins. Around the time Cy turned forty, he began to keep score with babies. Family size, as far as he was concerned, conferred status in the Greenwich league of hard-charging couples.

  Five, in Cy’s opinion, was the perfect number of kids. Five legitimized women who stayed home to raise their families. Five turned wives into CEOs, especially with nannies, maids, cooks, gardeners, drivers, personal trainers, and other employees cycling through the homes. Five was a career. Any less was a copout. Any more bordered on freakish, perhaps a religious thing. Above all, five was an obsession that spawned painful cracks.

  Cy: “We have seven bedrooms, Bianca. Are you waiting for something?”

  Cy: “So much for Brazilian factory output.”

  Cy: “Louise and Chip have five. Sally and Penn are adopting just to make their numbers.”

  Leeser’s perspective confused Bianca. “My husband thinks five kids are the new Birkin,” she once complained to several girlfriends. Brazil had its share of large families, but children were never a status symbol. More often than not, the number of kids correlated with the level of poverty.

  Five was one obsession. Blond was another. When the twins turned eleven, or maybe it was twelve, Leeser arranged for a hairdresser to visit the house under the cover of dark. He never discussed his scheme in advance, the “miracle bleach from the sun” that tied his wife in a knot.

  “It’s exactly what they need, Bianca.”

  “The twins are already beautiful,” she objected, horrified by the notion of their daughters going blond from a bottle. “Young girls don’t need help.”

  “The guy can do your hair, while he’s here,” Cy hammered away, widening the ever-growing fissure between their values.

  “What is it with you and blondes?” objected Bianca. “Not everybody in Greenwich is blond, you know.”

  “But everybody looks blond. I just want to give our girls a nudge.”

  Bianca never forgot the incident and resolved to protect her daughters at any cost. It broke her heart to send them to Andover when they turned fourteen. Distance shielded the twins from Cy’s crazy expectations, however, not to mention the constant sniping between mother and father.

  * * *

  Leeser turned onto the chip-stone driveway of his estate—19,000-square-foot home, five acres of manicured lawns suitable for ultimate croquet, and enough wetlands to moisten the eyes of conservationists. For a moment, he stopped and savored the twilight shadow. American elms, sawtooth oaks, and star magnolias—gracious boughs, all heavy with spring leaves, saluted his arrival and thanked him for sparing them from backhoes. He admired his rock-solid house, its stone walls hewn from a quarry in Peru or Chile or some remote place littered with ancient ruins.

  Not too shabby, Leeser decided. He didn’t have the flashy résumé of other hedge fund tycoons. He never played hockey at Harvard, like Phil Falcone from Harbinger or Tim Barakett from Atticus. What was it about banging heads and losing teeth that incubated great money managers? But he had done okay.

  “For a starter estate.” That was what his mother would say. She never saw his spread. He could almost hear her, though. “How come you didn’t buy the joint next door? It’s so much bigger.” And deep down, when Cy was relaxed and honest with himself, he knew she was right.

  Leeser eased the Bentley down the drive toward a five-bay garage. Bianca had insisted they dine at home tonight. She was cooking pasta, always an adventure.

  Her Bolognese tasted okay, nothing special. Nobody could botch a pound of ground beef, can of pre-sliced mushrooms, and jug of ready-mix sauce from the grocery. Throw the ingredients in a pot and stir the Ragú.

  The problem was Bianca. She spiked the sauce. The last batch had been a disaster. She broke into a crate of 1961 Chateau Latour.

  “To plump up the sauce,” explained Bianca, ten-minute chef who insisted on a healthy pour.

  Cy paid $390,000 for five cases; $390,000 for the dark garnet color with a “full-bodied nose.” Wine Advocate called 1961 Chateau Latour “one of the Bordeaux legends of the century.” Just thinking about the bottle, Leeser could almost smell its big-time aroma, the wisps of vanilla and smoky oaks, something wild and gamey to the scent. As far as he was concerned, it was not “one of the Bordeaux legends.” It was the wine of the twentieth century.

  “Wine eases acidity,” Bianca said, defending her choice.

  “So do Tums,” he countered. “Why don’t you stir in a roll?”

  Leeser winced as he remembered that night, the verbal firefight that escalated through the months. When Bianca’s dachshunds one-two peed on his $800,000 Chinese rug, things only got worse.

  He parked the Bentley and headed inside, wondering what to expect. Mr. and Mrs. Cyrus Leeser always dined at the local restaurants: Rebecca’s when the markets soared and the Elm Street Oyster House when they tumbled. The couple could afford a full-time chef. They could even rotate a few with different specialties through the kitchen. But in public they avoided the endless skirmishes that erupted in the privacy of their home, confrontations he labeled as “Shelter Skelter” when working out with guys at the gym.

  * * *

  Inside their kitchen Bianca pecked Leeser on the lips with a détente kiss—civil, practiced, and acceptable for public photo ops. “I have a surprise,” she announced.

  Freddy and Ginger, the dachshund dance duo, ripped around the corner and barreled into Leeser. He was their lord and master. His presence indicated they were about to be fed. Or maybe all the sniffing and snorting and scrambling around meant they shared Bianca’s secret.

  “Did our painting arrive from Iceland?” Leeser asked expectantly.

  “Yes,” she confirmed. “But that’s not my news.”

  “What do you think?” Cy asked excitedly, referring to his latest purchase from Siggi.

  “It’s still in the crate.”

  “Why didn’t you pull it out?”

  “You hate when I get into your things.” Suddenly, his wife sounded weary.

  “Oh, right.”

  “Siggi wants his U.S. team to install the painting tomorrow,” reported Bianca.

  “What’s your surprise?” Leeser asked, noting her waning interest.

  “I’m going back to college.”

  “That’s great,” Cy remarked, reaching deep to sound enthusiastic. “Where?”

  “NYU.”

  “How’d you swing that?”

  “Why the surprise, Cy? I wrote ten bestsellers.”

  “How’d you explain what happened in college?”

  Bianca’s face clouded from the question, and Leeser immediately braced for trouble. His cell phone rang, though, a random gift of fate that spared the couple fifteen rounds of Fight Club in the kitchen. He studied the caller ID and said, “I need to take this. Can you fetch a Mollydooker Boxer 2005?”

  Bianca bristled at the word “fetch” but headed toward the cellar as Cy marched into their great room.

  Leeser did not care if the entire sixty-dollar bottle of Mollydooker ended up in the Bolognese sauce. He forgot all about his Chateau Latour with the “big nose.” He missed the fury in Bianca’s brown eyes.

  Out of earshot, or so he thought, Cy whispered into the telep
hone, “Now is not a good time.”

  “Not my problem.”

  For a moment Leeser said nothing and listened. He gazed at an empty space to the right of a seven-foot fireplace. He forgot all about Siggi and the new painting. He ignored the dogs sniffing their favorite spot on his $800,000 rug. He tensed, listening to a familiar voice on the other end.

  * * *

  Two steps down the stairs to the wine cellar, Bianca stopped and whistled for Freddy and Ginger. They came ripping to the door, and she held out her left hand for them to sniff. It kept the dance team from yapping. With her right hand, Bianca pulled back her hair and cocked an ear around the corner. She could not help but eavesdrop.

  Bianca Santiago was a natural-born voyeur. Before Cy, or “BC” as she said, preternatural curiosity drove her rise as a bestselling romance novelist published in thirty-eight languages including Farsi, Tagalog, and Turkish. Before Cy, Bianca Santiago wanted nothing more than to turn her romance novels into a Hollywood soap opera.

  “I can’t talk,” Leeser whispered into the cell phone, turning his back to the cellar door, secreting the conversation from his wife. Cy’s face reddened. His eyes widened. His nostrils flared. He could do without this partner.

  Bianca strained to hear. The dogs lost interest in her fingers and broke for the rug, paws slipping on the glossy wooden floors as they scrambled. Cy’s body language, Bianca decided, could only mean the one thing she had long suspected. The late hours, the whispers, and the lack of interest in bed—she knew what was wrong. Cy was having an affair.

  A few muffled whispers, and Leeser finished on the phone. His body language went limp, which made Bianca wonder how any woman exercised that kind of power over her husband. It was impossible.

  Bianca whirled around and hustled down the stairs. In the dim light of the wine cellar, she clenched both fists and decided her husband’s infidelities required something extra, something special. Her beloved Dorothy Parker had said it best:

  “It serves me right for keeping all my eggs in one bastard.”

  * * *

  “Are you sure this will work?”

  “I’ve got it under control,” Leeser whispered into the phone.

  He paused, suppressing his anger as his partner spoke.

  “I’ve got it under control,” he repeated, doing his best to sound emphatic. “Cusack’s taking the job. He’s in financial trouble.”

  “How do you know, Cy?”

  “I ran the credit reports.”

  Leeser paused again, wincing at his partner’s reply and checking for Bianca. He was oblivious to Freddy of the lifted leg, this time sniffing around the carton from Iceland.

  “Give me a few months,” said Cy, “and Cusack’s father-in-law will be eating out of my hand. I bet we get Caleb Phelps as a client.”

  Leeser hung up and felt his shoulders slump. Nobody ever made him feel this impotent. Not even Bianca, who required ten times the care and maintenance of his Bentley. He headed into the kitchen to check the Bolognese sauce, eager to knock back a glass of Mollydooker and forget about his partner.

  Cy arrived just as Bianca tipped 1961 Chateau Latour into the sauce. By her calculations every ounce she poured, every gulp and gurgle of the dark garnet perfection, added $256 to the pot filled with five bucks of Ragú.

  “Not again,” Leeser muttered, wondering if he could list his wife on eBay.

  “Freddy, Ginger,” called Bianca. “Who likes Bolognese?”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  SHE’S A KILLER …

  The next morning, Rachel turned east at Sixty-ninth and Madison, careful to avoid a direct path between Doc’s clinic and the Colony Club. Repetition was careless in her profession, careless even here in New York. The city salted everything with two measures of chaos and a big dose of the unexpected.

  At Lexington and Sixty-fifth Rachel spied a woman, probably a nanny, screaming at her little red-haired boy. He wailed and bawled his eyes out, trying desperately to rip free from her clutch. She had lost it, her face bloated by exasperation or exhaustion, her free hand raised to strike.

  Rachel put her mission on hold, passed to the left, and hip-checked the nanny. The young woman lost hold of the boy’s hand and skidded to the pavement, scraping her chin on the curb.

  “Are you okay, little man?” Rachel asked the boy. He said nothing and sucked his thumb, not bothering to wipe the tears streaming down his cheeks.

  “Watch where you’re going,” the nanny hissed, struggling to sit up, rubbing blood from her chin.

  “The kid comes with a warranty,” Rachel warned, pulling the woman to her feet. “Mine.”

  With that, she continued down Lexington before turning west on Sixty-fourth toward Fifth Avenue. The nanny gaped, her jaw hanging slack. Rachel never bothered to look, though. She had crossed into the kill zone.

  “We have a date, Henrietta.”

  * * *

  By eleven A.M. Henrietta Hedgecock traded her Chanel suit for a black, one-piece Speedo. She tucked long white locks inside her swim cap, blue with a Nike swoosh across the front, and appraised her arms and upper body over the cool chop of the pool’s water. Hedgecock approved of what she saw. All her efforts—clothes, exercise, and trips to the salon, not to mention a thousand different moisturizers—paid off.

  Even at age seventy-six, Henrietta turned heads among New York’s haut monde of high-minded philanthropy and abused livers. Which was why she regarded the Colony Club’s pool as a safe house. Men never swam in it, and members seldom ventured into the basement. No hard stares of appraisal. No need to worry how she looked.

  Henrietta relished the temporary respite. She was not wearing jewels from Tiffany or makeup from the ground floor of Saks Fifth Avenue. She was wearing spandex from the Sports Authority. She did not trail sophisticated scents from perfume boutiques lining Madison Avenue. Henrietta reeked of chlorine. She loved the solitary pleasure of her morning workout, her translucent hands already wrinkling from the water.

  Hedgecock folded against the edge of the marble-and-tile pool, splashing water on her shoulders, prepping for thirty laps. In the adjacent lane a young woman glided through the water. With effortless strokes, she covered the length of the pool and executed a perfect flip turn at the far end.

  The maneuver looked impressive, the fluid motion of an elite athlete. Suddenly, the woman bugged Henrietta. It was partly the intrusion. Hedgecock could not remember sharing the pool with anyone during morning laps. It was also the damn flip turn.

  Hedgecock had attempted flip turns, on and off through forty years of laps, but never perfected them. Water filled her nostrils every time, either choking her lungs or making her sneeze. Even Hedgecock’s personal trainer had given up. He no longer tried to teach Henrietta the move. That was over ten years ago. And here in the Colony Club basement was a swimmer, violating Hedgecock’s one-woman, one-pool sanctuary and flipping with ease.

  The woman paddled closer, her freestyle flawless and smooth, her kick powerful. She touched the side of the pool in the adjacent lane, stopped for a breather at the edge, and smiled at Henrietta. Her eyes shone a brilliant green. A nasty round scar, top of her right hand, bulged with puffy white tissue. It looked like a cigarette burn.

  Henrietta averted her eyes. She fought the impulse to stare at the intruder’s damaged right hand. She never noticed what the woman was holding in her left, a curious piece of plastic that did not belong in a lap pool. For that matter, the object did not belong anywhere close to a seventy-six-year-old woman who prided herself on weighing 107 pounds dripping wet.

  The green-eyed swimmer, cute and buxom in her late twenties, wore a navy blue swimsuit and white cap. Pretty, but Henrietta knew one thing for sure. The woman was not a member of the Colony Club.

  “You must be a guest?”

  Henrietta spoke in her most charming and winsome voice. There was no accusation to her tone whatsoever. She was earnest and friendly, a big smile for the guest.

  “Yes,” replied the
woman. A few ringlets of blond hair peeked through her swim cap. “And this pool is fabulous.”

  Henrietta wondered how to ask, “Whose guest,” without being rude.

  Rachel, who had learned much about the membership by walking through the clubhouse, read the older woman’s thoughts. “Liz said I would love it down here. She was right.”

  “You mean Liz Southwick?” Henrietta immediately approved of the woman with green eyes and navy blue swimsuit.

  “Are you friends?” Rachel asked with enough charm to take gloss out of a photo.

  “Liz and I meet for lunch every Friday,” replied Henrietta. “Which reminds me, I need to start my laps. Otherwise, I’ll never finish in time.”

  “I need to finish a few things myself.”

  Henrietta started a steady breaststroke, which unlike the freestyle did not require flip turns. She loved the water. The pool invigorated her, chased the cruel aches that accompany seventy-six years and one false hip, turned her sixteen again if only for brief and glorious interludes. As she swam, however, Hedgecock decided there was something odd about the other woman.

  Rachel watched Henrietta’s steady cross. When the older woman covered a third of the pool, Rachel launched in hot pursuit. Her freestyle, a casual stroke to the bystander, was lightning fast. She easily passed Henrietta, executed a perfect flip turn, and drove off the side of the pool like a shark tasting blood.

  Kicking. Gliding. Hunting. Rachel rammed her syringe needle into the septuagenarian’s skinny thigh. Her thumb mashed down the plunger, and one hundred units of insulin gushed into Henrietta Hedgecock’s 107-pound, nondiabetic body.

  Ever the nurse, Rachel preferred Apidra for these occasions. It worked faster, in her opinion, than the competing brands of insulin that required fifteen minutes to take effect. Some diabetics could inject Apidra with no delay whatsoever. They gauged their intake—like one unit for every ten carbohydrates or five units for a combo of sweet yogurt and a granola bar—and gave themselves a shot before eating.

  Rachel did not calculate the carbs. She injected a hundred units of Apidra, which was a whopper shot by any standard. Hypoglycemia would start soon enough: rapid heartbeat, blurred vision, irritability, and the eventual loss of consciousness. She liked what the military called “redundant systems” in this hit. If Henrietta did not die from the diabetic coma, she would drown in the pool.