Murder Times Two

by Haughton Murphy

  READ was a spectacular success. The annual READ ball almost immediately became a must-be-seen-at social event. By inviting well-known authors eager for social pampering, she made the ball more interesting than the usual charity benefit; soon both socialites and authors were clamoring for invitations, the former at ever escalating prices and the latter, of course, for free. For years it has been the only benefit I know of that has a waiting list.

  Robyn’s success with READ eventually won Hendrik over. He became an enthusiastic contributor and, even in his nineties, made rare public appearances at the READ ball.

  The upshot of Hendrik’s approval was the now famous codicil that allowed Tobias to appoint a life estate to Robyn, if she survived him, in the income from the so-called Vandermeer Trust that Hendrik set up in his will.

  With the usual Vandermeer financial good luck, when Hendrik died in 1974, at the age of ninety-four, the New York real estate market was badly depressed. Thus his estate was valued at a mere (!) $90 million for estate-tax purposes (this at a time when the Federal estate-tax rate was a crippling 61 percent and the New York rate was an additional 21 percent). The canny old fellow had enough liquid assets squirreled away to pay these taxes, leaving the Bloemendael Foundation and the Vandermeer Trust each with half the Great Kill stock, each half being worth roughly $30 million. The Great Kill stock is now being reappraised and, given the huge increases in New York City land values since Hendrik’s death, each half is probably now worth on the order of $150 million.

  The years between Hendrik’s death and the tragedies of this spring you know about, though I’ll be happy to talk with you concerning them.

  I realize that this letter is terribly disjointed, and I apologize for my stilted old lawyer’s prose. I do hope, however, that it helps to fill in the background. Cynthia and I both wish you luck with your project.

  Fondly,

  REUBEN

  March

  2

  Getting Ready: I

  Kathleen Boyle was in a foul mood. Her Irish capacity for resentment, honed and refined over forty years as a domestic servant, was on display as she angrily plumped up the pillows on the sofa in the Vandermeer living room.

  Minutes before, Robyn Vandermeer had swept through, calling out instructions for things to be done. Her litany had included an icy order to remove a silver sugar bowl from the coffee table, her tone implying that she questioned why it was there in the first place.

  The maid bristled at the innuendo, but said nothing. She was perfectly aware that the sugar bowl should be removed, and she would take it away in her own good time. The only reason it was out on view at all was because of the overbearing Bill Kearney, the man who ran Mr. Vandermeer’s business and came to see him every Sunday. In his imperious way, Kearney had demanded a cup of coffee even before he had his coat off. Then, after he had been summoned by Tobias Vandermeer to the study on the next floor, the offending dish had been left behind.

  Kathleen Boyle’s grievances reframed themselves in her mind as questions. Why was Kearney around on Sunday anyway? Why didn’t he and Mr. Tobias do their business during the week like normal people? Getting a weekly report on how the books stood was probably not servile work, forbidden on the Sabbath, but it did seem inappropriate to her.

  And how could Mr. Tobias stand Kearney in the first place? Haughty to her, and even to Miss Robyn, always speaking to them in the condescending tones of an old-school monsignor, he changed completely when speaking to Mr. Tobias. No turnip-snagging peasant was more obsequious to his landlord than William Kearney was to Tobias Vandermeer. Sure, Mr. Tobias’ senses were usually clouded with drink, but even he must see what a toady his manager was. He must be good at what he does, Kathleen had reluctantly concluded.

  Normally she was able to avoid Kearney. All day Sunday and Tuesday afternoons were her time off. Except, for the last year or two, those Sundays every four months when it was Mrs. Vandermeer’s turn to entertain her reading club for supper and, what seemed to Kathleen the one time she stayed around for the whole event, interminable gabble about the book they all had copies of. She resented the reading club and its interference with her Sunday free time. Not that her Sundays were particularly exciting—generally a movie in the afternoon and the evening spent before the TV in her tiny quarters behind the kitchen. It was the smallest room in the eighteen-room Vandermeer complex, but it was comfortable and private.

  Spending her Sunday getting ready for the reading club did interfere with her routine. She couldn’t attend the eleven-thirty mass at St. Vincent’s, her favorite church, with the amiable Dominican friars and the choir, but instead had to trudge uptown to St. Jean Baptiste for the evening mass. And endless, endless sermons and “folk” music by a guitar-piano duo that struck her untutored ears as being not much short of sacrilegious. Vatican II and the sainted Pope John may have accomplished a great deal of good, but St. Jean’s folk mass did not prove it to Kathleen Boyle.

  Mulling over her immediate resentments as she worked about the living room inevitably fueled thoughts of older gripes and her growing apprehensions about working for the Vandermeers.

  There was, of course, the matter of the television. She had been insisting for months that her small set no longer worked properly. The picture was fuzzy, but Mrs. Vandermeer, after a personal inspection, pronounced it an irreparable fault of the cable hookup, not of the tiny set itself. This seemed wrong to Kathleen, since the large set in Mr. Tobias’ study always had a clear and distinct picture. To her, the struggle over the TV was simply one more example of the Missus’ increasing closeness with money. Never in Kathleen’s experience exactly open-handed, Robyn had some time ago become obsessed with saving money on the smallest items. Couldn’t the maid empty out the disposable bag in the vacuum cleaner and use it again? the Missus had asked her not long before. And she knew that Robyn Vandermeer reviewed the accounts of the new Japanese-American cook, Mr. Obuchi, all the time.

  Kathleen shrewdly guessed that Mr. Tobias must be keeping his wife on a short string, though she had no inkling why. Maybe it was just part of the overall change she had noticed in Mr. Tobias’ own habits.

  When she had come to work for the Vandermeers six years earlier, her predecessor, before packing up and retiring to County Clare, had warned her that Mr. Tobias “liked his whiskey.” This had not fazed Kathleen; after all, she had put up with a brother who not only liked whiskey but appeared to nourish himself on it.

  There was no denying, though, that Mr. Tobias’ drinking had become more intense. She recalled listening to him play the Steinway in the living room whenever it took his fancy, day or night. She had never cared much for the jazz music he pounded out, but she had recognized that his playing had deteriorated and become more discordant and painful to listen to as time went on. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, what a noise he could make!

  Mr. Tobias had become a mean blackguard, Kathleen thought. Fits of temper were now frequent, or, what Kathleen found worse, he lapsed into a morose state that sometimes lasted throughout the day, almost as if he were haunted by some unspoken reality. Maybe he was keeping a closer watch on his checkbook as part of this withdrawal.

  The matter of money had come up specifically in connection with Kathleen’s extra duties on the reading club Sundays. When approached about the matter, Kathleen, trying to be obliging, had worked the first one and then protested. Serving supper to eleven people, and then acting as their waitress while they went on about their book over drinks, was too much. Besides, Mr. Obuchi had made clear when he was hired that he would never work on Sunday, reading club or no reading club. Robyn’s efforts to persuade him otherwise had been without avail; his command of English, such as it was, disappeared completely whenever the subject was raised. He had eventually agreed to prepare a supper in advance, the result being that Kathleen became an unwilling kitchen helper as well as a server in the dining room.

  After listening to Kathleen’s complaints, Robyn Vandermeer offered to pay her more money for the
extra work. But Kathleen was more interested in her Sunday freedom and insisted that additional help was needed. Robyn was petulant and only agreed most reluctantly to hire a waiter to assist and to relieve Kathleen in the late afternoon (a much more expensive proposition than paying her over-time). He came from Bright Lights, the catering agency that Robyn, and half the hostesses in New York, used for their larger parties. The creation of Byron Hayden, a former child actor who outgrew his talent, Bright Lights possessed a Rolodex full of the names of hungry, out-of-work actors eager to staff everything from a small at-home dinner to a charity banquet in the Sixty-sixth Street Armory.

  This March Sunday, Bright Lights had served up Pace Padgett, an unemployed actor who had worked at the Vandermeers’ on several recent occasions, including the reading club supper the previous November and, that same month, a three-day “house party” when the Vandermeers entertained a dozen of Robyn’s friends who had flown in from Europe to attend the READ ball.

  Kathleen was of two minds about her helper. He was pleasant enough and, she thought, would even be good-looking if he shaved off his mustache and had his medium-length black hair properly cut. And, having worked the Vandermeers’ residence before, he did not ask a lot of dumb questions about such matters as where the wineglasses were or how to run the dishwasher.

  Pace had not won Kathleen’s complete approval, however. She did not at all like the arty manner in which he set the table, with flared napkins at each place. Nor the way he took charge and treated Kathleen as his assistant, rather than as the senior servant of the household, even to the point of answering the telephone, clearly Kathleen’s prerogative. And worse, going off to make calls of his own without asking her permission. He certainly makes himself at home, Kathleen thought, but did not challenge her only route to partial Sunday deliverance.

  By five-thirty, all was in readiness for the reading club, which would begin with drinks at six. Kathleen Boyle looked around with satisfaction. Everything was spotless, the bar stocked and the ice bucket filled. The silver and crystal on the dining-room table gleamed. The dishes were laid out in the kitchen for the supper Mr. Obuchi had left behind. The Missus would have nothing to complain about.

  Kathleen said good-bye to Pace Padgett and hurried away, eager to make her exit before the Missus or Mr. Tobias could interrupt her day off any further.

  3

  Getting Ready: II

  “Well, dear, I’m as ready as I’ll ever be,” Cynthia Frost said as she walked into the library, where Reuben was puttering at his desk, working his way through a pile of accumulated paper. He looked up at his wife, pleased as always to take in the slim dancer’s figure she had managed to preserve years after her retirement as a ballerina. She was carrying a paperback edition of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, which she waved at her husband.

  “Well, so am I,” he replied. “Having nothing better to do while you were off gallivanting in Chicago, I reread parts thirteen through sixteen last night.”

  Cynthia, who was in charge of performing-arts grants at the prestigious Brigham Foundation, had been away for two days in Chicago, trying to assist in the latest effort to establish a viable ballet company in that city. She had attended a dinner of potential backers the night before and had offered up a Brigham grant, conditioned on obtaining a matching amount from local sources.

  Cynthia had been annoyed at the inconvenience of attending an out-of-town dinner on a Saturday night, even though, as she and her husband got older, the working world’s distinction between weeknights and the weekend no longer was as pronounced for them as it once had been. But her annoyance had been tempered by the enthusiasm she had encountered, though she realized that it was not the first time that there were bright predictions that ballet was, at last, going to be put on a sound footing in the Windy City.

  She had eaten the execrable lunch served on the plane and, after a brief report of her travels to Reuben when she arrived home, had gone immediately to her room to prepare for the evening’s session of Robyn Vandermeer’s reading club. It was not exactly her idea of ending a day that had begun at the Chicago Ritz at seven that morning, though she was reasonably sure she could not persuade Reuben to skip the monthly event. But it was worth a try.

  “I’m afraid my gallivanting, as you call it, has taken more out of me than I thought,” she said. “Do we really have to go tonight?”

  “We’ll talk about it in a minute,” her husband answered, instinctively employing the lawyer’s trick of meeting confrontation with delay. “What do you think of this? Do we need it?”

  Reuben handed his wife a flier from the telephone company extolling the virtues of call-forwarding.

  “This thing says you can program your phone so your calls will go to another number,” Frost explained. “Like everything the phone company does, it’s only pennies a day.”

  “What on earth would we use it for?” Cynthia asked, as she looked over the advertisement.

  “Well …”

  “Reuben, sometimes I don’t understand you, even after forty what? forty-four years of marriage. I can remember when you could barely plug in a toaster—and refused to learn anything mechanical. Now, ever since Doug Gilmore persuaded you to buy that computer, you’ve suddenly become Dr. Steinmetz.”

  “Now, wait a minute. You wanted me to get my computer,” he said, gesturing toward the sleek machine sitting on the side of his desk.

  “Yes, I did. I thought it would—”

  “—Occupy me.”

  “Yes, occupy you. And maybe tempt you to start writing down some of the interesting things that have happened in your life.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “But it’s turned out to preoccupy you. It, and now all these other toys you want. Call-forwarding. Or that machine you mentioned the other day, the fax.”

  “Everyone has a fax,” Frost protested.

  “What would you do with it?” Cynthia asked, then suddenly realizing that this was perhaps not the most politic question for her retired husband. “But that doesn’t matter. If you want one, for heaven’s sake get one. We’ll end up with more electronic equipment than the Russian Mission on Sixty-seventh Street, but that’s all right.”

  “I’m going to buy one. All the people at the office say they’re wonderful. Imagine, sending copies of things over the telephone.

  “And I’m going to have a modem, too,” he added. “Gil-more tells me that with a modem you can do all kinds of things. Like access back articles from The New York Times. Or get airplane schedules and stock reports. Or even play blackjack.”

  “Reuben, you’re impossible.”

  “So be it. But you haven’t answered my question about call-forwarding.”

  “I really don’t see what use it would be. Unless of course you want all your calls transferred while you’re down with the boys at the Gotham. And, if we may go back to where we started, do we have to go to Robyn’s?”

  Reuben’s filibuster was over. “Of course we do, dear, unless you really feel terrible. I know, we both were hoodwinked into the damn thing—Robyn called you ten minutes after writing a big check to NatBallet, and Tobias followed up right after a meeting on high-fee legal business at Chase & Ward. But as I said then, and have been saying ever since, if we do it, we have to take it seriously. That means reading the books and going to every meeting. Look at the Jeromes. They come only half the time and are completely lost when they do.”

  “I don’t think their being lost has anything to do with their attendance.”

  “Okay, Ted Jerome is dense, and his wife almost as dense. But I still say we have to go regularly to make the thing work.”

  “You’re right, of course,” Cynthia said with a sigh.

  “It will improve your mind—Robyn’s lofty goal for the group.”

  “Hah!” Cynthia snorted. “That’s what she told W when they did that piece on reading clubs. But you know as well as I do the motive was that earlier interview with her in Vogue.”

  “Oh, yes.”
Reuben chuckled, recalling the story, which was sufficiently delicious that his wife now repeated it.

  “I’m surprised she ever admitted it to me. But I can just see it—there she was, holding forth about READ and all its good works, helping the little illiterates and the big illiterates learn to read. Then the bitch reporter asked Robyn what she had read recently.”

  “He-hee.”

  “And recorded poor Robyn’s hesitation in print. Well, the reading club was born instantly after that article appeared. First Light in August and now Vanity Fair. And here we are, stuck on another Sunday. Thank God the episodes we’re reading this month should make for a lively discussion. Or as lively as it ever gets.”

  “I agree. I can’t wait to hear what the group’s got to say about Becky Sharp this time.”

  “Besides, I would hate to deprive you of a chance to be taken by the hand through Thackeray by Helena New-comb.”

  “That’s a low blow. Just because Helena doesn’t look like your typical frumpy professor of English. She may be a trifle, ah, overblown, like a fading movie star, but she’s very smart.”

  “Oh, I grant you that. She’s no affirmative action case, and I’m sure got tenure at Princeton on her merits. But that long blond hair and buxom figure can’t have done her any harm.”

  “I’m not so sure. She may have gotten ahead in spite of her looks. Academics are capable of envying anything—from mammillae to monographs, from derrieres to—”

  “Reuben, please. I’m sorry I brought it up. Helena leads the discussions very well. I wonder how Robyn found her.”

  “Wrote her a letter, is what she told me. It’s not too surprising. Helena reviews in the Times a lot and her book on Thackeray is pretty well known, I think.”

  “I should go get ready,” Cynthia said. “I must pretty up so I don’t look like Barbara Givens.”