Deadly Rich

by Edward Stewart

  For the last half hour the child had shown no awareness at all of Leigh or the fairy tale, but he seemed to realize she’d stopped reading. He turned his head and at last she had his attention.

  “Can you guess what the king saw?” Leigh said.

  The child gazed up at her, his hair spilling out around his head like a frazzled black helmet.

  “Do you think the king saw the blackbird?”

  The child screwed up his face.

  “Do you think the king saw the gazelle?”

  The child was thoughtful.

  “Then what did the king see? I bet you already know.”

  The child shook his head.

  “Yes, you do know,” Leigh said. “That’s why you’re smiling.”

  “I’m not smiling,” the child said.

  Leigh’s heart gave a jump inside her chest. He’d said an entire sentence. He hadn’t said an entire sentence for how long now—almost two weeks. “Oh, yes, you are smiling. I can see the smile right there.” She reached out and touched the corner of his mouth.

  He burst into giggles.

  She opened the picture book again. “The king went into the garden the next morning, and he saw that the snow had vanished and all the queen’s—” She peeked around the edge of the book. “And all the queen’s what?”

  “Roses!” the child shouted.

  Leigh stretched the moment. She peered into the book with a baffled look, then back at the child with a disappointed look, then back at the book. “You’re right!”

  Something skimmed across the child’s face, and he opened his mouth and let out a high, wild, rippling laugh.

  “All the queen’s roses were in bloom,” Leigh read. “And the kingdom rejoiced, for the spell of the evil wizard had at last been broken.”

  Now the child was watching her closely. He had the look of a solemn deer.

  He was six years old. Nothing but life had been given to him: he had had to struggle for every ounce he possessed of humanness. His name was Happy, and Leigh was as proud of her association with this child as she had been of any friendship in her life.

  “The king said to the prince, ‘You have vanquished the wizard, and you shall have your reward. Whatever you wish I shall grant you.’ The prince said, ‘I wish the hand of your daughter the princess in marriage.’”

  Leigh felt morally inferior to Happy. He existed like a tree or a rock or a flower, without troubling the universe. She felt he had a great deal to teach her.

  “The king blessed the royal pair, and decreed seven days of celebration. At the end of seven days the prince married the princess. And …” Leigh closed the picture book. “And can you guess what happened after that?”

  Happy shook his head.

  “Oh, yes, you can. The prince and the princess lived …”

  “Happily ever after!”

  “You’re right!”

  Happy giggled and began slapping his fists on the xylophone.

  The front door slammed. A moment later Happy’s father strode into the living room.

  “Happy and I just finished a story,” Leigh said.

  “Good.” Ruddy-faced and military with his bristling crew cut, Luddie bent down and hugged the boy.

  Happy stopped moving. Stopped laughing. Completely stopped.

  Why is he always so quiet around his father? Leigh wondered. Why does he just click off when Luddie comes into the room?

  “Coffee?” Luddie offered.

  She looked at her watch. “Sure. I have a little time.”

  She went into the kitchen and helped Luddie load up the coffee maker.

  “How’s Waldo?” Luddie said.

  Leigh shrugged. Waldo Carnegie was the man she’d been living with since her detox, and Luddie had an annoying habit of saying she’d exchanged one dependency for another. “Waldo’s okay.”

  “You should leave him,” Luddie said. “Really. What do you get from him?”

  Leigh sighed. Every now and then Luddie got on this refrain, and she hated it.

  “Money?” he said. “You’re working again. You don’t need money. Companionship? The only time you two even have dinner together is when he’s giving himself a birthday party and inviting half the planetary media. Do you two even sleep together?”

  “Come on, Waldo is a hardworking, decent human being.”

  “Okay, in minuscule ways, he’s a mensch.”

  She followed Luddie back into the living room. They dropped onto the canvas-covered sofa.

  “Why don’t you just admit you don’t like my friends?” Leigh said finally.

  Luddie shrugged. “It’s not that I dislike them. I’m only asking why you have to have these particular friends? For instance, why these two gals you’re having lunch with tomorrow? Why if you can’t stand them do you agree to meet them?”

  “Because I grew up with them. They’re part of me.”

  Happy tapped out three notes on his xylophone. The sounds hovered in the air like dust motes.

  “They aren’t necessary to you,” Luddie said. “You’ve always got the option of detaching. If they live in burning houses, it doesn’t mean you have to go up in flames with them.”

  “Why are you always tearing my world down, Luddie?”

  “What do you want me to do—ask for your autograph? Get it through your head that no one’s going to love you till you learn to give yourself a little unconditional love.”

  “What the hell is unconditional love?” she said.

  “What do you think I give you?”

  “Luddie, I’m not you. I haven’t got it to give.”

  “Bullshit. What did you just give my son? What do you give him two times a week?”

  “I play with him.”

  Luddie fixed her with the manic, electrifying blue of his eyes, “That is as hands-on and unconditional as love can get. You’re here for him when he needs you.”

  “So are a lot of other people. I’m just a couple of hours a week, Tuesdays and Fridays.”

  Luddie shook his head and sat there for a long, silent moment appraising her. “Not only would I not lift a finger to help you when you sell yourself short like that but I wouldn’t lift a leg to piss on you.”

  “You put it so agreeably, Luddie.”

  “You make choices in life every goddamned minute you breathe. Not making a choice is still choosing. It’s a loser’s choice, but it’s a choice. Recognize it. You chose to be a drunk, and you chose to stop being a drunk. You chose to enter AA, and the latest I heard, you choose to stay in AA. You chose me to be your AA sponsor, and you can tell me to go to hell anytime you want. You chose to live with a self-important billionaire eunuch, and God knows why, you choose to keep doing it. You chose to have lunch tomorrow with a political fanatic and a drunk, and you can still pick up the phone and cancel.”

  “It’s only twice a year—and we’re friends.”

  “And you have a choice, so don’t come whining to me that you’re trapped. You don’t have to sit there for two hours. You can take those bitches shopping.”

  She drew in a deep breath and pulled her voice way, way down. “There’s a new boutique at Marsh and Bonner’s, and I hear the designer’s great. I had them pencil us in for a private showing at two-thirty. And please don’t call my friends bitches.”

  “Cut lunch short.” Luddie tossed her a lopsided, cynical grin. “Get to Marsh and Bonner’s at one-thirty. Say you made a mistake.”

  “I thought you wanted me to be honest.”

  “Then get to Marsh and Bonner’s at one-thirty and don’t say you made a mistake. Just get your ass out of that restaurant before your two pals have you drinking again.”

  THREE

  Wednesday, May 8

  “HI, KIDS,” LEIGH SAID with her best reunion smile.

  “Hi, toots,” Oona said. “What’s the magic word?”

  Leigh bent down and exchanged the ritual lunchtime kiss with each of her schoolchums, lips barely brushing makeup. A waiter pulled out a chair for h
er and she sat. “Have you two said anything interesting yet?”

  “Waiting for you before we bother.” Tori, with her small freckle-splashed nose and dimpled cheeks, had a face that would have seemed impishly pretty if she hadn’t countered the effect with enormous, rimless aviator glasses. The glasses made her look intelligent.

  Leigh had never understood why Tori needed to look intelligent. Tori had been Phi Beta Kappa at Smith, and surely being intelligent was enough.

  “Would you care for something to drink?” the waiter asked.

  Leigh took the linen napkin from the wineglass and spread it on her lap. She saw that Oona was working on a split of Piper and then she saw a split already up-ended in the wine bucket and she realized this was not Oona’s first.

  Tori was drinking a Kir.

  “Just some diet Pepsi for me.” Leigh’s hand went to the tiny platinum hummingbird that she had pinned to the lapel of her ecru silk jacket. She drew an instant’s security from its touch. Encrusted with emerald and ruby chips no larger than grains of demerara sugar, it exactly matched the brooches that Oona and Tori were wearing.

  They had made presents to one another of the three hummingbirds when they were students at Smith. They wore the brooches only when they were alone together—which had come to mean at these twice-yearly lunches, when they did their best to pretend the last fifteen years hadn’t changed a thing and they loved one another just as much now as they had then.

  “Ugh,” Oona said. “How can you drink diet anything?”

  Oona had been a beautiful young woman in college, in the blond way of the time, and usually Leigh saw her with the eye of memory. But today, in the noon light pouring in through the window onto the best table in Archibald’s, memory didn’t have a chance. Oona looked like an artifact—her face powdered white as rice paper, the makeup heavy as ink on a Chinese scroll. She was like a clumsy tracing of a beautiful picture.

  “We were talking about Ronald Ballantine,” Oona said.

  “Never heard of Ronald Ballantine,” Leigh said.

  “The Wall Street lawyer.” Oona nodded toward another table. “Right over there.”

  Leigh glanced toward the corner table. “Still haven’t heard of him.”

  “He’s on the cover of New York this week,” Oona said.

  “And he’ll be the lead article in Vanity Fair next month,” Tori said.

  “I see overnight success is still a growth industry in this town,” Leigh said.

  “Until last night,” Oona said, “Ronnie was the guy everyone wanted. Men wanted him for litigations, women wanted him for dinner parties; today no one wants him, except the SEC—for fraud. That woman he’s having lunch with is Dorcas Stockelberg. She’s a major stockholder in Exxon, and she’s trying to leverage a takeover of Saks.”

  Despite herself Leigh was taken by something guileless in Oona’s open love of scuttlebutt.

  Tori, on the other hand, clearly was not. “That’s only a rumor,” she said.

  “There’s more than rumor to the rumor,” Oona said. “Look who just joined them.”

  An extremely tall man in a dark blue Ralph Lauren suit and a towering brown toupee had joined the corner table. Leigh recognized Stanley Siff, the Park Avenue South-based conglomerateur whose takeover schemes had plunged three New York department stores and two national airlines into liquidation. His wife, tall and dark and stagily glamorous in a borderline anorectic way, was sitting down beside him. Under her maiden name, Gloria Spahn, she designed dresses. Leigh estimated that a dozen of them were being worn in this very room at this very moment.

  “Why’s Stanley involved?” Leigh said.

  “The buzz is,” Oona said, “Saks refused to carry Gloria’s evening dresses.”

  “That man has destroyed retailing in this city,” Tori said.

  “Oh, come on,” Oona said. “He happens to be damned good at what he does, and he gets a kick out of it.”

  “That’s still no excuse for doing it,” Tori said,

  “I couldn’t disagree more,” Oona said. “We’re all in a race with the Reaper, so there’s no sense wasting time. You’ve got to pick two or three things you really like to do, and then do five of them.”

  Tori heaved a short sigh filled with resignation. Her eyes flicked up at Leigh.

  “Waiter!” Oona snapped her fingers.

  Their waiter approached the table. “Yes, ma’am?”

  “This dip is rancid,” Oona said.

  Leigh had not seen Oona so much as taste the dip. It came in a hand-painted little Provencal terra-cotta pot and there did not appear to be even a ripple disturbing its smooth surface.

  “You know we flavor it with Pernod,” the waiter said.

  “Young man, I’ve been coming to this restaurant since it opened—of course I know you flavor the dip with Pernod. The Pernod is not the problem, the rancid crème fraîche is the problem. Please take this dip back to the kitchen and bring us a fresh bowl.”

  The waiter took the pot of dip and gave a slight bow of the head.

  “Really,” Oona said, “this city is getting impossible.”

  Leigh was thinking, sadly, how alcohol could twist a person, how it had twisted her once upon a time, and how it was twisting Oona now. For almost two years something inside Oona seemed to have been losing its resilience, like a spring stretched too far: little things had begun getting on her nerves, she had begun taking them as personal affronts—and now she had begun imagining affronts as well.

  “You have to fight for everything in this town,” Oona was saying. “Just the other day I was at Bergdorf’s and—” The flow of her words broke off. She was staring across the room. Her eyes were wide and her face had a stunned look. “I don’t believe it. Oh, my God, I do not believe this!”

  “What’s that, darling?” Tori said.

  “He’s back there in the kitchen slicing endive.”

  “Who’s back where?”

  “What’s his name—you remember—Jim Delancey.”

  Leigh felt a queasy sense of unreality. She realized her hands were cold and at the same time beginning to perspire.

  The smile had dropped off Tori’s face. “Oona—please.”

  “Don’t Oona, please me—I’m talking about the man who killed Nita.”

  “We know who Jim Delancey is,” Leigh said quietly.

  “Well, he’s in that kitchen tossing salads.”

  “That’s not possible,” Tori said.

  “Just look through that door the next time it swings open. He’s standing there in plain view.”

  Leigh turned her gaze by slow degrees. The room with its carved mahogany bar and close-packed tables seemed to narrow, pulsing with each beat of her heart. Now she could see the kitchen door.

  The noise of a siren howled down the street outside.

  The door swung open and their waiter stepped through. Behind him Leigh could see a Korean and a black man in chef’s hats, mincing vegetables at a butcher-block counter.

  She let her breath out. Of all possible delusions, she wondered, why had Oona had to imagine Nita’s killer in the kitchen?

  The waiter set a fresh pot of Pernod dip on their table.

  “I will not eat this food.” The sound of Oona’s voice carried through the entire room. “Get the manager over here.”

  Leigh realized it was going to get worse. She lowered her eyes. She felt shrunken.

  There was a silence behind her head. The other patrons in the restaurant had stopped talking. She could feel them with her skin, sitting there utterly quiet, not speaking, not clinking a fork.

  A man in a dark tailored suit came rapidly across the room. “Bonjour, mesdames, how may I help you?”

  “Are you the manager?” Oona said. “I’ve never seen you here before.”

  “The manager is not here today, ma’am. I’m the assistant manager. Could I help you?”

  A tilt came into Oona’s jaw and her face tightened. “Yes, you could. What is your name?”

 
; “My name is Matthieu.”

  Oona foraged in her Gucci purse and pulled out an expired Percodan prescription and began writing on the back of it. “All right, Matthieu. First of all you could explain to me what a convicted murderer is doing in your kitchen slicing endive.”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am, but there must be some mistake.”

  “There sure is and I’m not the one making it.”

  “Oona. Please.” Tori gathered up her purse. “We have to go.”

  “I’m not through,” Oona said.

  “There isn’t time,” Leigh said. “We have an appointment at Marsh and Bonner’s.”

  Leigh handed Oona her jacket. “Come on, darling.”

  Oona waved her prescription at the assistant manager’s face like a straight-edged razor. “Get rid of him,” she warned, “or I will personally see to it that this restaurant is killed in the columns.”

  Out on the sidewalk Oona looked up at the sky. She seemed genuinely surprised to see the sun peeking through scudding clouds. She dipped a heavily braceleted arm into her bag and dragged out a pair of sunglasses. She spent much too long a moment getting them to stay on her nose. Tori hailed a cab and Leigh helped Oona into the rear seat.

  “Where to, ladies?” the driver said.

  “Marsh and Bonner’s,” Leigh said. “Fifty-seventh and Fifth.”

  The cab pulled into traffic.

  Leigh patted Oona’s hand. “You’ll be calm, won’t you, darling?”

  INSIDE MARSH AND BONNER’S with its three-story atrium, the air was cool and pleasantly perfumed. Well-dressed, well-mannered customers strolled the aisles, pausing to discuss scarves or cosmetics or gloves with well-dressed, well-mannered salespeople. A subdued murmur of civilized voices flowed across the gleaming display cases.

  Leigh and Tori guided Oona to the elevator.

  “I swear,” Oona said, “when you have murderers slicing radicchio at Archibald’s, you know these are the plague years.”

  “Mezzanine,” the elevator operator said.

  “What’s happening in this town?” Oona said. “Who’s minding the store? The PLO? Bishop Tutu? Somebody’s got to care!”