“And I said, ‘Oona darling, I just don’t know if I could get through it.’”
Dick was the only raconteur Dizey had ever met who got it right when he imitated himself.
“And Oona said, ‘Fuck it, baby’—she talked low-down and gutsy like that, in that wonderful Tallulah voice of hers—I’ll get you through it.’ And do you know, when I arrived at Oona’s—she was in Beekman Place in those days—I was expecting it to be the hardest evening of my life. I stepped through that door and Oona had rounded up every one of my chums, God knows how. Babe Paley and the Nixons and Slim Keith and George Cukor had flown in from the Coast and Liza M. and Barbara Stanwyck and Mary Tyler M. and goddamn but Oona had even persuaded Jackie O to cancel an opera benefit—and my God, we partied.”
Dick Braidy stepped back from the mike and looked up toward the ceiling.
“And I know that this very moment, somewhere up there in the sky, there’s a great party going on and Oona is right there in the middle of it, organizing and starring in the biggest bash heaven ever saw. Good-bye, Oona. God bless—and party on!”
Dick Braidy waved good-bye.
A pianist launched into “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.”
Dick Braidy took the mike again. “Oona’s friends have asked me to mention that food and drink are being served at Oona’s. Sorry I won’t be seeing you there.”
“I don’t believe it.” Dizey gathered up her purse. “Mac, remind me to nail that bastard and his dead stepdaughter in my next column.”
A BELL TING-A-LINGED as Rick pushed the door open and stepped into the flower shop. The air in the shop was cool and moist and heavy with sweet pungency, as though he had stepped into a tropical rain forest.
A heavy-set woman with pulled-back gray hair eyed him through thick bifocals. “Help you?”
Her face told him he was in the wrong place, Fleurs du Monde did not have his kind in mind when they put the OPEN sign in the door.
“I want something pretty,” he said. “Really knockout pretty.”
She sighed. “We have a minimum of twenty dollars per order.”
He opened his wallet and took out four five-dollar bills and laid them on the counter.
She smiled. “Will these be a gift for a lady?”
“You’d better believe I’m not getting them for myself.”
“Might I suggest some very nice Dutch tulips?”
His eye went to one of the refrigerated display cases, to a huge vase of velvety red roses caught in a sparkling slant of light. He pointed. “Those.”
“The burgundy roses? They’re … quite expensive. You’d like a half dozen?”
“Two dozen.”
“That will be ninety-four dollars plus tax.”
She waited till he laid down ten tens and ten singles. Her smile became pure spun sugar. She took the flowers from the case and neatly clipped each stem. She wrapped the roses in a layer of white tissue, then a layer of green, then cellophane, and finally a heavy candy-cane paper with the name of the shop embossed on it.
“Would you like to put a message with these?” She pushed a small, cream-colored card across the counter.
“I sure would.” Rick wrote in large letters, in red ballpoint: to Francoise Ford with love, Bob De Niro.
The woman began tucking the card into an envelope and he stopped her.
“No envelope. I want it to show.”
She looked at him strangely, then taped the card to the wrapping paper. “And to whom will these go?”
He nodded toward the thick black book with orange print on its spine that lay on the shelf behind her.
“Can I see your Social Register?”
Something suspicious flashed behind her bifocal lenses. She handed him the book.
He leafed immediately to New York, and then to the F’s. He found a Mr. and Mrs. Gavin Hay Ford on East Seventy-eighth Street and saw that she was the former Olga Slimoniska. They had homes in Newport, Dark Harbor, Palm Beach, and Nassau, and there was a daughter named Francoise.
He memorized the address and closed the book.
“And where would you like these delivered?” the woman asked.
“Thanks, I’ll take them myself.”
YOU WOULD HAVE NEEDED a traffic cop to direct the limousines arriving at Olga and Francoise Ford’s building. And that was what they had. Their own traffic cop.
A stream of costumed figures swept under the awning into the lobby. The women were edged in whitecaps of diamonds and laughter splattered out of them in jagged bursts.
Rick stood on East Seventy-eighth Street, watching.
There were two black Chrysler sedans parked in the street with federal license plates. A man who looked like Secret Service stood beside the building entrance, keeping watch calmly from the outskirts.
Rick looked for an opening in the flow, and then he saw it.
One of the guests dropped her purse just outside the entrance. The Secret Service man crouched down to the sidewalk and played a flashlight across the pavement.
Rick crossed the street. He ducked around the taillights of a black Chrysler LeBaron stretch limo and cut ahead of a tall, tanned couple who were speaking Castilian Spanish.
He made it past the Secret Service man into the lobby.
A crowd of guests were waiting for the next elevator. The air swirled with perfume and laughter. Jeweled wrists and necks threw tiny explosions of color.
A uniformed employee of the building stood just outside the elevator. He caught sight of Rick and thrust out a white-gloved hand.
Rick held up the bouquet. “Flowers for Francoise Ford.”
The employee nodded him through. “The service elevator’s not working—take this one.”
Rick squeezed into the elevator.
“What did that Rubens cost her?” a man was saying.
“Half of what Sotheby’s claimed,” a woman with a low voice answered.
Everybody chuckled.
A tall woman in black velvet was repositioning her diamond necklace. She pushed huge puffy sleeves against Rick’s face as though he weren’t there.
“You’re caught in back,” a man said. A hand with gold cuff links crashed through Rick’s bouquet and tugged at the necklace catch.
Rick took a step backward.
A woman in green silk pulled back as though he’d tried to jab her with an AIDS-infected needle. “Do you mind?” she snapped. Her escort took a handkerchief from the breast pocket of his tuxedo and quickly dusted off the part of her forearm that Rick had brushed. Rick recognized the escort: Dick Braidy, from Bodies-PLUS.
Rick smiled and caught Braidy’s eye. “Hi,” he said.
Dick Braidy’s eyebrows rose. “I beg your pardon?”
“It’s me. Rick. Hi.”
“Are you talking to me?” Dick Braidy said.
Rick couldn’t believe Dick Braidy didn’t recognize him.
“Really,” the woman in green silk said.
Dick Braidy turned his head the other way.
“Don’t they have a service elevator?” the woman in green said.
“The feds commandeered it,” someone else said.
“Leave it to a former cleaning woman,” Dick Braidy said, “to come up with the ne plus ultra of hired help.”
Laughter exploded. The elevator stopped and the guests flowed out into a foyer papered in Chinese red. A security man stood by the doorway, checking guests’ names off a list.
There were shouted greetings and kisses. A relay team of uniformed maids stood taking women’s wraps. Somewhere a live orchestra was playing dance music. Rick stood close to the wall, trying to see over jeweled and dyed heads into the apartment, hoping for a glimpse of Francoise.
A stocky man wearing a dark suit, not a tuxedo, moved rapidly toward him. “May I help you?” There was nothing helpful in his challenge, and Rick could smell the government-issue revolver under his left armpit.
“Flowers for Francoise Ford.”
The man practically ripped the
bouquet from Rick’s hands. “I’ll see she gets them.”
“I’d like to do the arrangement myself.”
“Sorry. This is all the arranging they get.”
THIRTY-FOUR
IN THE LIMOUSINE DIZEY unwrapped her new brooch. “Like it?”
“Divine,” Mac said.
Dizey pinned the brooch to her dress. “Do I have it on straight?”
“Perfect.”
Dizey gave her throat and ears fresh dabs of Guerlain. The limo stopped a half block from Oona’s town house. Dizey rolled down the window to put her head out and look. The street was pure limo gridlock.
“Come on, Mac. We’ll walk.”
Dizey was pleased with the turnout, for Oona’s sake. Inside the house she was less pleased. So many people were waiting for the elevator that she decided to take the stairs.
“Dizey baby,” the bartender sang out. He had pale brown hair and a cute choir-boy nose, and Dizey liked the way his spearmint eyes were cruising her. “The usual?”
“Easy on the soda,” Dizey reminded him.
This was the kid who claimed to have some very interesting love letters and Polaroids relating to Malcolm Forbes. Dizey intended to get a peek at that material.
“And a one-inch twist of—he cocked a finger at her—“lime.”
“Go to the head of the class.”
He handed her the vodka and soda, and Dizey took a long sip. She stood for a moment, big-boned and proud and erect in her black Gloria Spahn pants suit, watching the crowd flow through the town house.
In the dining room, the up-and-coming catering firm of Splendiferous Eats had laid out a buffet for two hundred. Laughing nouveaux aristocrats explored the silver-and-flower-laden tables. They were playing New, York’s favorite food game: What-the-hell-is-this, or You-call-it-crêpe-fromage-but-Bubba-called-it-a-blintz.
“Oat-bran blinis,” Dale Dunlop, the president of Splendiferous Eats, whispered to Dizey, “with Petrossian gray unsalted caviar.”
Dale wore the beard of an El Greco saint. He had resigned a position as a Wall Street arbitrageur to plunge into New York’s cutthroat catering business. Dizey didn’t object to giving him a plug in her column; but she’d be damned if she’d plug Petrossian—they’d made her pay for her last meal.
Dizey nodded to her assistant. “Mac, make a note: oat-bran blinis, and see if Dale will give you the ingredients.”
Dale was about to protest.
Dizey turned, smiling her biggest grin. “I didn’t say the whole recipe, Dale. Just the basic vos-iz-dos.” She moved briskly into the crowd, with the purposefulness of a heat-seeking missile. “There’d better be some good dish here for the column.”
In the living room the air was sticky, almost confining. There were too many people, too much talking at once, too many perfumes, and the caterer’s hot hors d’oeuvres were giving off a sweet-sour smell, as if someone had made Chinese food and forgotten to open a window.
On the sofa, Fenny Gurdon was holding a group of listeners spellbound with the story of how he’d gone into the wrong bathroom at Stanley Siff and Gloria Spahn’s thirty-eight-room Park Avenue duplex, and how he’d seen Stanley’s thirty-two toupees sitting on a shelf on numbered wig stands.
“The toupees were arranged so it would look like he gets his monthly haircut on the fifteenth. But what I can’t figure out”—Fenny had had a few and he was bellowing—“What’s with the thirty-second toupee? What the hell day of the month is that one for? Valentine’s Day?”
The crowd roared.
What made this story particularly fun for Dizey was that Stanley Siff and Gloria Spahn were standing by the piano, well within earshot, toughing it out.
Dizey tilted a wing and coasted near.
Gloria was trying to impress Jeanie Vanderbilt with that ancient story about Louis Auchincloss’s wife and the sugar bowl.
“Fenny Gurdon’s got a point,” Dizey said in an undertone to Stanley’s pink little ear. “Your rug looks like a hooker’s muff.”
Behind Stanley’s eyes was a sudden flare-up of loathing. “You’d know all about a hooker’s muff, wouldn’t you, Dizey?”
Dizey felt a cold swell of outrage and no desire to control it. Okay, Stanley, she vowed to herself: Death. “Listen, if the ICC doesn’t pull the plug on your next raid on the city’s pension funds, my column will.”
Dizey glanced across the living room toward the French windows. They led to the terrace, and the dimness beyond them was sliding toward darkness.
The beam of a soft spotlight fell across the terrace. A woman was moving through the potted trees and terrace furniture, and every now and then she passed through the shaft of light.
Dizey excused herself and opened the French window. She felt she was stepping into a furnace. How, she wondered, had Manhattanites ever managed to stay alive before air-conditioning?
“Hey,” she called out, “come on back inside and circulate. This is Oona’s last party!”
The silhouette held itself motionless at the terrace wall. Behind it there was only a thinning pale splash of sky over Jersey to remind you that there had ever been a day.
“I was thinking of the dead,” Leigh Baker said.
Dizey crossed the terrace toward her. “What about them?”
Leigh Baker turned and stood facing Dizey.
What is it about beautiful sexy people? Dizey wondered. Light seems to shine through them. Even in the dark. In all her years of reporting on them, Dizey had never understood how they achieved that quality.
“So many have died,” Leigh said. “Parents … grandparents … friends—you finally reach that point in your life where you know more dead people than living.”
“So what?” Dizey said. “The dead may outnumber the living, but the unborn outnumber them all.”
Leigh was holding a glass and she lifted it to her lips. “Why, Dizey. What a profound and spiritual thing to say.”
“I’d have thought it’s obvious.”
Somewhere not far away a church bell was chiming the quarter hour.
Leigh lifted her eyes at Dizey. “I see your old humorous, frowning eyes looking about, and I know you’re on the trail of something. And then it occurs to me; I’m your quarry, aren’t I.”
In the mind of any top gossip columnist is stored every impression, every sensation, every emotion and intuition she has ever experienced—ready for instant cross-reference and collating. And every bone in Dizey’s body sweated with the conviction that she had seen Leigh Baker this way before, in the bad old days when Leigh had gotten plastered with daily regularity.
Dizey sat. “Your answering machine had the gall to tell me to make my message brief.”
“What were you calling me about?”
“Wanted to check a rumor. How are you feeling—really?”
“Me? Fine.”
“Honey, I know you’ve walked a strange and terrible road. I want to help you find your way back. You’re drinking again, aren’t you?”
Leigh rose and backed off a step. She was gaping at Dizey, and Dizey could feel her trying to hold herself together.
“Why is it,” Leigh said, “that people like you feel alive only when you destroy things?”
“Honey, is that a line from one of your old movies, or is it just alcoholic attitude?” She rose. “There’s Scotch in that glass, isn’t there?”
“No.”
“I want to help you find your way back.”
Leigh backed off two steps more, as though Dizey were a guard dog who might at any moment break free of its leash and leap at her.
“Honey, you need me.” Dizey circled nearer to that glass. “You’ve had your little turn on the stage of international attention and now—unless you get the right help—it’s over.”
“And I’m supposed to believe you’re the right help?”
Leigh’s nose tipped up a little, and it gave her a look of being vulnerable. Dizey could remember long, lonely years in Billings, Montana, that she’d spent w
ishing to hell God had given her a nose like that.
“I can’t stand to see you killing yourself,” Dizey said.
“That’s bull. No matter what’s going on you’re always asking yourself, How can I get a column inch out of this?”
“There are losers and there are winners—that’s life. A flip of a coin.” Dizey held out her hand. “I write about the people that the coin comes up heads for. You could be one of them again. Just give me that drink.”
“It’s not a drink.”
“Then give it to me.”
“It’s mine.”
“And it’s killing you.”
“Are you really so sure of everything you’re so sure of?” There was something sly about Leigh now. Gold flashed from the bracelet on her wrist. Her hand shot up, pointing. “Look out there.”
Dizey’s head turned just far enough to see what Leigh was pointing at. Night sky glimmered over New York.
“Somewhere in this city,” Leigh said, “a man who calls himself Society Sam is watching us—and he’s going to pick one of us, and he’s going to rip that person apart.” She turned. “And you’re no different from Society Sam.”
To Dizey Duke, what came next seemed to be happening to someone else.
One instant Leigh Baker was standing perfectly quietly, her head angled out toward the New York skyline; the next instant she turned toward Dizey.
Suddenly a terrible cry came out of Leigh Baker. “That’s Oona’s! You give that back to me, you vicious, thieving bitch! It’s hers!”
The drink and the ice cubes flew out of Leigh Baker’s glass and hit Dizey in the face like a stinging shower of iced needles. Dizey realized that Leigh’s hand was reaching toward the brooch, toward Dizey’s lovely new hummingbird brooch.
Without even thinking, Dizey hunched one shoulder up protectively and jerked backward.
Would have jerked backward.
Out of nowhere a wall took her completely by surprise, caught her just below the small of her back. Her hand clawed space and caught the back of the wrought-iron chair. The chair wasn’t heavy enough to anchor her. It toppled against the wall, adding a push to the momentum already carrying her.
Deadly Rich Page 28
