The Jewels of Tessa Kent

by Judith Krantz

  “Oh, he’d use another private detective, of course. He’d have to.”

  “ ‘Another’?”

  “How do you think they knew where to send the documents? Miss Horvath had simply disappeared, or so I heard around the watercooler.”

  Polly was speechless. Maggie had disappeared from somewhere? A private detective had been snooping around and found out that Maggie was living in her spare room?

  “Goodness gracious,” she breathed when she finally found her voice.

  “Or, as my grandmother would say, a pretty kettle of fish.”

  Polly and Jane looked at each other wide-eyed. This was as close as either of them had come to such a situation and neither of them tried to hide the fact that they were enjoying the drama of it.

  “Jane,” Polly finally said, breaking their long, speculative silence, “there’s no possibility that Maggie will get home for at least four hours, assuming that she comes back at all tonight. Often she doesn’t. Aren’t you roasting in all that leather you’re wearing?”

  “Actually I am feeling a bit overheated. And it’s so cozy in here. I feel so relaxed, you’ve been so kind to me, Polly. The mere thought of trying to get back to the office empty-handed in this storm …”

  “Why don’t you make yourself comfortable for a while longer? Why rush to disappoint Mr. Butler?”

  “Well … perhaps … it’s not as though I could hope to get a taxi in this weather, and the buses are so jammed they don’t even stop.”

  “If you take your jacket and pants off,” Polly said casually, “I’ll bring you a blanket so you can stretch out on the sofa and take a nap. Naps are great when it’s snowing.”

  “Or, consider this alternative, Polly. I could take your clothes off, very, very slowly, one adorable, dainty, tiny little piece at a time. And skip the nap.”

  Polly purred, her intuition validated. “I’d prefer that. Then I can see the rest of the interesting tattoo that’s just peeking out of your cuff.”

  “I’d been wondering … if maybe you might … and hoping you would.”

  The next evening, when Maggie finally struggled home, trekking cross-town on foot from S & S, after spending the previous night with Andy, Polly looked up, took off the strong magnifying glasses she wore while painting, and said, “Join me for dinner? I’m baking a mustard chicken with winter squash.”

  “You’ve saved my life, I’m wiped out, completely exhausted. This filthy weather! It took hours to get home. I’ve got to have a hot bath and then I’ll be right in. Oh, you are heaven-sent, Polly!”

  Polly carved the chicken and poured Maggie three glasses of wine while the tired girl ate hungrily, the two friends enjoying the meal in companionable, rarely broken silence.

  “Now that you’re fed,” Polly said, after Maggie had eaten two slices of her apple pie, “I have a duty to perform. I didn’t want to ruin your appetite by giving it to you before dinner.”

  “Huh?”

  “It’s this registered letter,” she said, thrusting it into Maggie’s hand. “It arrived here yesterday. The person who brought it said that it was absolutely necessary for you to open it and sign it, and somehow or other I got talked into promising to give it to you. I’m sorry about that, but seriously, whatever it is, Maggie, you can’t expect our postman to keep on walking up six flights, he’ll have a heart attack and it’ll be on your conscience.”

  “Shit!” Maggie glared at the envelope.

  “Heavens! What can be so terrible? And how do you know when you haven’t even opened it?” Polly asked, her curiosity more inflamed than ever by the sight of Maggie’s furious face.

  “I know who these lawyers are and I know what it’s about. Damn it to hell, how’d they find me? I thought if I printed ‘return to sender’ on the envelopes they wouldn’t know I lived here.”

  “A private detective found out where you were living, and what’s more, if you don’t sign it, some monster of a big-shot lawyer is going to come to your office to make you sign it.”

  “What! What!” Maggie burst into tears of rage. “Who told you that?”

  “I did a little detective work myself on the messenger. I don’t like people meddling with you, Maggie.”

  “Oh,” Maggie wept, her angry tears redoubled, “why can’t she leave me alone? I told her I didn’t want the money, that I wouldn’t touch it, isn’t that enough? She put a detective on me, she knows where I am, maybe she has me followed everywhere … oh, God, Polly, I don’t know what to do.”

  “What money?”

  “A bequest … a will.”

  “Well what’s so terrible about that?”

  Maggie looked at Polly through her tears and saw the sensible, concerned, deeply fond face of the only female friend she had in the world, the only woman besides Elizabeth, the cook, who’d ever treated her with affection and real interest, the only person besides Andy and Barney who cared about her.

  She wiped her eyes and huddled in the corner of the sofa. “My so-called mother’s husband died and left me money, that’s what the document has to be about,” she told Polly in a shaking voice.

  “He wasn’t your father?”

  “No. And I don’t want his money.”

  “Wait a minute. What’s wrong with inheriting money? He was your stepfather, why shouldn’t he leave you money? That doesn’t make sense, Maggie. And you’ve never spoken of a mother, much less a ‘so-called mother,’ whatever that means. You never mentioned a family, you never go home for holidays …?”

  “Polly! If I tell you the whole story, will you promise me never to mention it again, ever, as long as you live? Nobody in the world knows it except me and the woman who gave birth to me.”

  “I’ll promise, and you can count on me to keep my promise, but I want you to be sure you truly want to tell me,” Polly said, more serious than Maggie had ever seen her. “There’s nothing worse than telling a secret to a friend and then hating yourself afterward because you wish you hadn’t. It’s ruined many friendships and no secret’s worth that. I’d much rather not know than have you regret that you told me.”

  “Polly, I have to tell someone and I trust you entirely. It’s eating away at me, I try not to let myself think about it, I forbid myself to think about it, but it keeps coming into my mind anyway, all the time, and I dream about it, so many nights … such sad, sad dreams. If I can share it with you, I’ll feel better. I certainly won’t feel worse. I think I need some sympathy and there’s nobody more sympathetic than you.”

  “Tea-and-Sympathy Guildenstern,” Polly laughed.

  “An unbeatable combination.”

  “Well, then, go ahead and tell me.”

  Maggie took a deep breath and, in as few words as possible, told Polly her whole story, leaving out any identification of the people involved. She kept her eyes fixed in her lap as she spoke, as unemotionally as possible. As the story unfolded, Polly grew more and more outraged, although she kept her feelings to herself until Maggie’s silence indicated that there was nothing more to tell.

  “What kind of inhuman bitch could do that to her own child?” Polly finally burst out after Maggie stopped talking.

  “Tessa Kent could do that, Tessa Kent, who was born Teresa Horvath, she could do that to me, she did do that to me.”

  “You’re … you’re Tessa Kent’s daughter.”

  “Biologically, yes. In any other way, no.”

  “My God. Tessa Kent! Tessa Kent … I … it’s … my God, how could she? How could she!”

  “That’s exactly what I keep asking myself.”

  “It’s what anybody sane would ask.”

  “Oh, Polly, it is, isn’t it? There’s no excuse, is there? I’ve tried and tried to think of one, but I can’t.”

  “You can’t because it doesn’t exist! What she did is beyond inexcusable! When you think of all those movie stars having babies without being married and showing them off in the magazines … it’s not as if there’s a stigma attached to it anymore, not in Ho
llywood. And she’s young, she’s not of the older generation, she can’t be more than …”

  “Thirty-three.”

  “Look, Maggie, you’ve been treated so badly I don’t know what to say, there are no words to express how I feel. It’s been a tragedy for you and all the sympathy I have won’t help, not if I talked all night, which I’m afraid I just might do. But right now you’ve got to be practical, you don’t want an angry lawyer showing up looking for you at S and S and causing a lot of talk. Now that they know where you live, you’re going to have to open the letter and see what it is and deal with it.”

  “I know, I’ve known all along that it wouldn’t just go away. You’re right, damn it.” Maggie ripped open the envelope and read the pages it contained. “Well, it’s what I guessed it would be. They’re finally finishing the settlement of Luke’s estate—the husband who died—and they need me to sign as one of the people he left money to. If I sign, I get the money when I’m thirty-five, meanwhile it’ll be in trust and I’ll get the income.”

  “Are you absolutely sure you don’t want it, Maggie?”

  “Absolutely, a hundred percent. I’m going to write out a strong statement to that effect and send it back with this letter. A person has a right to refuse a bequest, don’t they?”

  “I don’t really know, legally, but realistically, how can they force you to take something you don’t want?”

  “They can’t,” Maggie said grimly. “I intend to stay independent, no matter what.”

  “I’d take it myself, in a wink, no matter what. It would be something, anyway, that you’d get out of all of this. A private income never did anyone any harm.”

  “It’s not what I needed all of my life, it’s not what I want, now, or ever wanted.”

  “Too little, too late, you mean?”

  “No, Polly, too much, much too much, and much too late.”

  26

  Where’s a temp? I have to have one desperately! Somebody, find me a temp!” Maggie looked up from the Xerox machine to see a woman she knew only as Lee Maine, the head of the press office, standing in front of the elevator doors with a wild look on her distinguished, lovely face.

  “I’m a temp,” she said, leaving her machine. “What can I do for you?”

  “Man the battle stations! This is ridiculous! I have to go to Philadelphia in ten minutes to work on the blasted American Primitives sale and there’s nobody, not one solitary soul, in my blasted department! My second-in-command had a premature baby over the weekend, I still haven’t replaced the little traitor who defected to Sotheby’s last week, and my last remaining assistant just called in sick with flu! Damn all three of them! Now listen closely. I want you to sit in my office and answer phones, take messages, tell one and all I’ll be back tomorrow. If anybody in this place tries to get you to do something else, anything at all, tell them Lee Maine said she’d strangle you with her bare hands if you so much as left the desk except to pee.”

  Maggie grinned down at the beautiful, dark-eyed woman with a long curve of straight silver hair that fit her elegant head perfectly. She had small bones and was probably four inches shorter than Maggie.

  “I warn you, I’d probably put up a fight,” she heard herself say.

  “I don’t have a sense of humor, whoever you are, but I insist on a minimum, a bare minimum of competence.”

  “I won’t even pee,” Maggie said hastily.

  “That’s better. And while you’re at it, take a look at the piles of work on the other desks. Maybe you’ll find some little thing you can try to do between calls, but don’t leave the office, on pain of death. That phone must be answered! We live by the phone!”

  “Got it, don’t worry. Do you want me to call you with messages during the day?”

  “Good God, no, don’t tie up the phone lines. I’ll be back tomorrow. And you’d damn well better be there,” she warned. Lee Maine belted herself into a long red coat, jammed a Cossack’s black astrakhan hat on her head, and, pulling on her long gloves, took off without another word, leaving Maggie to find the press office for herself.

  Within five minutes she’d settled herself at one of the three assistants’ desks and started eagerly going through the various auction catalogs she found lying there. She soon realized that many of the sales coming up, according to the dates on the catalogs, were unaccompanied by any sort of press release. Memos, all begging for releases, were tucked into many of the catalogs, along with the forms for such releases.

  Perhaps they’d already been written, Maggie thought, and the memos were out of date, but an interoffice phone check of the departments involved revealed only that they were waiting impatiently for the press releases to arrive so that they could send them to their usual media sources.

  Did Lee Maine have any idea what an unholy mess her department was? Maggie wondered, as she bent over a computer. She’d said that she insisted on a bare minimum of competence, but it didn’t look to her as if she’d been getting even that from her staff. If some of these releases weren’t written at once, they risked appearing only a week or so before the sales involved, and it was self-evident that the longer people knew about a sale in advance, the more popular it would be.

  In her days running the school paper at Elm Country Day, Maggie had been accustomed to putting out the paper almost single-handedly, writing everything from humorous columns to thoughtful editorials. She found a file of old press releases and quickly realized that there was no mystery to them. The process obviously should start with studying each sale’s catalog to pick out the most newsworthy items, and translating that into a lively press release, short enough to be read quickly but long enough to tantalize the imagination of possible collectors. She could write as well as or better than the sample releases, she thought, grinning to herself. Most of them were too long and didn’t grab her attention.

  In spite of frequent phone interruptions, by lunchtime she’d finished the work on one desk and started on the second, finding a floater to bring her a sandwich and a secretary to sit by the phone while she made a hurried visit to the ladies’ room. It was one thing to promise not to pee, another to carry it out. By nine at night, Maggie, working as if the devil were riding behind her, had finished every press release that had been left undone on all three assistants’ desks, printed them out on the laser printer, and stacked them in a neat pile on Lee Maine’s desk, each attached to the relevant catalog. Next to them she put the neatly written pile of dozens of phone messages that had arrived during the day.

  The next morning she was sitting primly at one of the desks outside of Lee Maine’s office when the press office head arrived, in a flurry of questions. “Who called? Any emergencies? Did you find anything you could manage to do?”

  “Everything’s on your desk,” Maggie said, biting her lip in nervousness. Had she presumed? Was her method the right one for writing press releases? Lee Maine disappeared into her office, closed the door behind, and stayed there for at least a half hour without buzzing. Suddenly she rushed out.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Maggie Horvath.”

  “Do you insist on being a temp?”

  “Good God, no! My ambition is to be a galley slave.”

  “Perfect. You’re hired. Only don’t work this hard or they’ll cut my staff down to just you and you’ll burn out at this pace. Also, you’d better write the next batch of releases quite a bit longer to give the editor something to cut, editors always have to find a reason to cut, remember that, or they’d be out of their own jobs.”

  “What—what do I call myself if anybody asks?” Maggie ventured, electrified with excitement.

  “Press officer for Scott and Scott.”

  “Press officer? Oh, Miss Maine, thank you!”

  “Thank me? I’m the lucky one. And call me Lee, everyone else does, unless they really know me and then they call me Lee, darling. When did you get here? At S and S I mean, not this morning, because you must have slept in the office last night.”


  “I started last fall, in September.”

  “Good grief! It’s almost March—you’ve been a temp for more than five months. What’s wrong with the people here?”

  “Nobody ever asked me to see what else I could do. Xeroxing has been my chief mode of self-expression. Sending a fax made my day.”

  “Madness, sheer madness,” Lee Maine said in wonder. “All right, Maggie, take these around to where they’re needed and report back here. I have a bunch of notes from Philadelphia for you to start working on with Fred Cashmere in the catalog department, he’ll explain what to do. I’ve got to rush down to the sales rooms. There’s a Contemporary Print sale on exhibition and I have to do some serious media hand-kissing. Wait a sec, that still leaves nobody to answer the phones … well, find a temp somewhere, grab her, and make sure she stays here till one of us gets back. ”

  “Will do. What should I tell the personnel department?”

  “That you’ve been promoted—no, make that hijacked, full time—that you’re working for me now, exclusively, and they’d better find another temp to take your place.”

  “Miss Maine … salary?”

  “Whatever you’ve been making, plus twenty-five dollars a week and lots of free lunches. PR is about free lunches, among other things, including keeping this auction house going almost single-handedly.” Lee Maine disappeared with a wave.

  Press officer, Maggie said to herself, PRESS OFFICER! Oh, yes! Polly would be thrilled for her, “press officer” sounded so wonderfully butch. And Andy … Maggie, in her daze of delight, suddenly remembered Andy, still a floater. How would he feel?

  She probably wasn’t going to have a terrible problem with Andy’s reaction to her new eminence, she decided, on reflection. He seemed quite content with his humble position, showing a lack of ambition that puzzled Maggie.

  On the other hand, she had to admit that his job, which so lacked any status, was ten times more interesting than that of a temp. Since she’d known him, he’d floated to Toronto to help out at an important sale of English furniture; he’d floated to Mexico City with a group of experts who were cataloging the entire contents of a Mexican collector’s huge estate; and he’d floated to L.A. with the chief of the Department of Impressionist Paintings, because the widow of a studio head had decided to divest herself of her husband’s world-renowned collection so that she could find a renewed social life in buying the work of contemporary artists. “They always need somebody to go out for pizza,” was Andy’s standard comment when Maggie enviously asked him the details of his travels.