Divas

by Rebecca Chance

  ‘It doesn’t matter, ’ her mother had said, squeezing her hand. ‘It doesn’t matter about the service, darling. We’ll see him laid to rest. That’s the most important thing.’

  So they had walked slowly to the empty grave, and stood beside it, waiting, for half an hour, shivering slightly in the breeze. There were enough of them so that they didn’t look completely forlorn: Lola; Suzanne; Neville, Suzanne’s companion; George; and India.

  Still holding her mother’s hand, Lola realised how glad she was that Suzanne had come. Barely off the plane from London, Suzanne had only had time to run a brush through her hair, pin it up into a loose bun and pull on an old black crepe trouser suit. Of course, because she was Suzanne Myers, an ex-supermodel, she still looked as if she were about to be shot for Vogue. The trouser suit was Donna Karan, cut to show off Suzanne’s endless legs. Her pearl necklace glowed against her skin, making its tan look healthy, rather than weather-beaten. And because Suzanne never dressed as lamb instead of mutton – because her suit, and the simple black blouse underneath it, was perfectly appropriate for a glamorous 55-year-old – she looked at least fifteen years younger than her real age.

  The skinny, goateed, ponytailed young man at her mother’s side was wearing a shabby black suit and scruffy shirt and tie; he looked more like an undertaker’s assistant than a mourner at a society funeral. This was Neville, who seemed to have been promoted from gardener to Suzanne’s boyfriend, judging by the fond glances they kept giving each other and the affectionate way Suzanne had straightened his tie earlier.

  I’m glad she’s happy, Lola thought. I mean, he’s not who I’d have pictured as my mum’s boyfriend, but I’m glad she’s happy. And he’s obviously madly in love with her . . .

  She exchanged glances with India, who smiled back gravely. Lola had told India about the other girls’ treachery, and India had been so shocked she hadn’t been able to get a word out for ages. Lola had texted the other three to say she knew they’d sold stories about her and to stay away in future, and ignored the flood of pleading calls, texts and emails that had inevitably poured in.

  At least I know who my friends are, she thought, tightening her grip on her mother’s hand as the coffin approached.

  ‘Your father will love it here, ’ Suzanne said bravely, her voice beginning to crack with grief, staring down at the huge hole that had been cut to accommodate the plus-size coffin. ‘I see just why he bought it. Astors and Audubons, a famous battlefield – it’s got high society, history, river views. The whole package.’

  ‘Oh, Mummy . . .’

  Tears pricked at Lola’s eyes as she and Suzanne hugged each other tightly.

  ‘I know we didn’t agree on anything by the end, ’ Suzanne cried against Lola. ‘I know we wanted completely different things. I just didn’t want him to leave me, like that, for her. I never thought he’d actually want a divorce, not after all the years we’d had together.’

  ‘Daddy always loved you, I know he did, ’ Lola said, hugging her mother even closer. ‘But you knew Daddy, he always needed to know where the next party was. And, Mummy, you never wanted that kind of life. You were complete opposites.’

  ‘I know . . .’ Suzanne sobbed. ‘I just wanted to be in his life still . . . I loved him so much . . . God, I swore I wouldn’t cry!’

  She pulled back a little, because Neville was offering her a tissue.

  ‘Thanks, darling, ’ Suzanne said, taking it and blowing her nose. ‘At least I haven’t got any make-up on but waterproof mascara . . . nothing to smudge.’

  ‘You haven’t got any make-up on?’ India said incredulously.

  ‘Those days are long behind me, sweetie, ’ Suzanne said, crumpling up the tissue, handing it to Neville and taking a second one for another blow. ‘You should all go make-up free, you girls. It’s so much better for your skin.’

  Even India couldn’t help gaping at this and mouthing: ‘She’s crazy!’ at Lola. Lola twirled her finger by the side of her head in response, to indicate that her mother wasn’t always to be taken 100 per cent seriously.

  ‘You always look wonderful, ’ said Neville worshipfully.

  ‘She sure does, ’ George agreed fondly, smiling at Suzanne.

  ‘Oh, George, ’ Suzanne said, patting him on the arm. ‘It’s so nice to see you again. I just wish it was in happier circumstances.’

  ‘Me too, babe. Me too, ’ George said in heartfelt tones.

  Organ music floated out from the church as the pallbearers rounded a stand of trees and came fully into view, carrying their huge burden. Suzanne paled visibly.

  ‘Oh my God, ’ she breathed, fresh tears pouring down her face.

  Wordlessly, Neville handed her more tissues. She took them with her left hand, her right still clutching onto her daughter’s.

  Lola was mesmerised by the sight of the coffin. Had her father really been that large? He must have been, of course, behind all that clever Italian tailoring of his suits, always with faint vertical stripes to slim him down. And he’d been tall, which meant he had carried his heft well. But still, the sheer bulk of the coffin was shocking.

  A Canada goose from the ornamental lake chose that moment to take off, its heavy wings beating as it flew overhead, honking loudly. Lola’s eyes followed its flight as it swooped past the big elm tree, and as she did so she noticed a small figure standing half-hidden behind the tree. It was a woman, dressed in black from head to toe: tight jeans, a polo-neck sweater, and a baseball cap pulled down over her face.

  Despite the attempt to conceal her features, Lola recognised her instantly.

  Her whole body stiffened in shock.

  It was Evie.

  Evie had been drinking latte in a local coffee shop and reading the Post that morning when she saw the Page Six item.

  ‘Guess it always helps to be connected – even when you’re about to be six feet under! Ben Fitzgerald, legendary property developer and plus-size social animal, made his last and best deal when he cinched himself a coveted burial plot at Trinity Cemetery. Last guy to manage that? Ed Koch, no less, ex-mayor of this fair town. Kudos to Fitzgerald, those are some favours he called in! The funeral’s at three this afternoon and expect fireworks – will his wife Carin clash with his daughter Lola, ex-fiancée of troubled industrial heir Jean-Marc van der Veer, who’s recently checked himself into the Cascabel rehab clinic? Don’t forget, Lola’s due to stand trial in just a couple of weeks for murdering dear departed Daddy! Plus there’s the wild card – Evie Lopez, aka Diamond. Remember her? Once a stripper and Ben’s mistress, now showgirl supreme with her sexy sold-out mermaid act at hot burlesque joint of the moment, Maud’s! Will Evie dare to show her face at the funeral? Won’t be a dull moment at this interment, that’s for sure – just the way party-loving Ben would have wanted!’

  To Evie’s eternal shame, her first reaction was one of heart-pumping triumph.

  They printed my name again! They put ‘Remember her’? like I’m a character in a soap opera, that’s so cool! They said my show was sold out! God, Maud’s is going to be so pleased with this!

  And then, even more shamingly: I should ask for a bonus.

  It was only after all those thoughts had shot through her mind, as brightly coloured and fast as the Pow! Zam! Kaboom! in comics when the super hero’s punching out the supervillain, that Evie came down to earth and realised what the real point of the story was.

  Benny was being buried today: she had to be there.

  But that wasn’t all it meant.

  Choking down her coffee, grabbing the pastry and throwing a ten on the counter to more than cover the bill, Evie turned on her heel and raced out the door of the coffee shop. Down Varick, across Flushing Boulevard, dashing straight across traffic, hearing a cabbie behind her scream curses as he veered into the next lane to avoid her, nearly clipping a truck, hitting the sidewalk and tearing back towards the warehouse, sprinting, her heels barely touching the ground. Three flights up, past her own steel door and up to Lawrence an
d Autumn’s, through the open door and, thank God, a piece of luck, Lawrence in the kitchen juicing some weird-looking fruit in quiet, Zen-master-y concentration, and looking so handsome that Evie momentarily, just momentarily, forgot what the hell she was there for and just stopped dead in the doorway, gawping at him and fighting the urge to rip that fruit out of his hand, throw it over her shoulder and jump his bones.

  No question. She definitely wasn’t over Lawrence yet.

  ‘Benny’s funeral’s today!’ she blurted out.

  Lawrence put the fruit down and contemplated Evie, his grey eyes full of empathy.

  ‘And you want me to come with you?’ he asked.

  ‘No! The last place you should be is the funeral!’ Evie was flushed with excitement, tripping on the sheer brilliance of her idea. ‘Don’t you see? The house will be empty! Practically everyone will be at the funeral! You show up, saying you had an appointment with Carin, and if there’s someone there, you talk your way in, and you’ll have the best chance to snoop around!’

  She realised she was incredibly hungry, and that there was a crushed croissant in her hand, flaking and squished by being gripped hard, but still most definitely eatable. She took a huge bite.

  ‘You get it?’ she said, through a mouthful of flaky, buttery pastry. ‘We really, really need to find that nurse, Lawrence. The PI Simon Poluck hired’s coming up with nothing. Carin’s hiding the nurse out till the trial so no one can get to him. But we have to. We have to get to him and persuade him to tell the truth on the stand. Or Lola will be convicted for something she didn’t do, and that bitch Carin won’t get what’s coming to her.’

  ‘This is about justice, Evie, ’ Lawrence corrected her gravely. ‘Not revenge.’

  By now, after some experience with the shit Lawrence was prone to coming out with, Evie had pretty much perfected the ability to feel like she was rolling her eyes without actually doing it.

  ‘Oh, yeah, sure, ’ she assured him. ‘Justice. Absolutely.’

  ‘OK, ’ Lawrence said, taking up the piece of fruit again and twisting it on his little plastic juicer. ‘I’ll do it.’

  ‘Oh, Lawrence! Thank you!’

  Evie ran across the kitchen and hugged him – from behind, because there was a table in front of him. As she pressed her body into his, feeling his shape all too easily through his tank top and linen drawstring pants, she closed her eyes involuntarily, inhaling his scent, her nose pressed against his lean, muscled back, the few light gold hairs tickling her nose.

  She thought suddenly of that fairy tale she’d read years ago. Some guy who was super-strong, but needed to keep his feet on the earth. That was where his power came from. Some other guy had picked him up and then he was as weak as a kitten, couldn’t fight at all. No, shit, it wasn’t something she’d read: she’d seen it on TV. That show The Adventures of Hercules. It was one of the guys Hercules had fought. Not a fairy tale. What was it they called that Ancient Greek stuff?

  Myths. That’s right. Myths. What a stupid word. Really hard to say.

  Evie wasn’t weak without Lawrence: she was never weak, goddammit. But touching Lawrence gave her strength. He grounded her, made her feel incredibly secure. As if this was where she belonged.

  Shit, Benny’s impending funeral had made her sloppy and sentimental. Evie jerked away from Lawrence’s warm back as if it were burning her and headed for the door without looking back.

  Chapter 30

  Two big catering vans, one with a refrigerated unit clattering noisily, were pulled up outside Carin’s mansion on 53rd Street. Lawrence stood on the sidewalk for a moment, watching covered trays being pulled out from the tightly packed shelves along the sides of the van and whisked down the side steps of the town house by a cadre of Mexican employees in white uniforms, their faces concentrated, their movements efficient. It took Panio a long time to open the door, and when he eventually did, he was clearly distracted, his smooth dark hair slightly disarranged.

  ‘Sorry for the delay, ’ he said automatically, ‘I’m supervising everything in the kitchen—’

  He double-took when he saw Lawrence, his smooth handsome face registering complete surprise.

  ‘Lawrence! You’re so not booked in today!’ he exclaimed, his language, under stress, reverting to a normal 27-year-old’s, rather than his usual English-butler routine.

  Lawrence hated to lie, and did it as rarely as humanly possible. But the extreme composure which he had developed through years of daily meditation enabled him to meet Panio’s eyes with a limpid gaze and say, in a lightly surprised voice,

  ‘Really? I was sure I had three p.m. in the diary. Shall I check?’

  His hand went to the pocket of his track pants.

  ‘No, no, ’ Panio, said, looking harassed. ‘I mean, even if you did have it down, everything’s up in the air anyway. The city morgue released Mr Fitzgerald’s body yesterday afternoon, so we booked in the funeral for – like, now, ’ he said, checking his watch. ‘And then there’s the wake afterwards, and the caterers have shown up way later than they said they would, so you see—’

  He gestured beyond Lawrence to the two catering vans.

  ‘Not exactly a good time, ’ he finished. ‘Just bill us for a session, OK? No problem.’

  He started to close the door. Lawrence took a step forward.

  ‘I don’t feel right about that, ’ he said. ‘Why don’t I make myself useful? I’ve been wanting to do some adjustments on the gym equipment. I could make sure the hand weights are calibrated—’

  ‘Sure, sure, come on in, then, ’ Panio interrupted him, flinging the door wide. ‘You know your way around, yeah? Just let yourself out when you’re done—’

  As Lawrence walked into the hall, Panio flicked his eyes up and down Lawrence’s lean body with a distinctly appreciative gaze.

  ‘Or, hey, I’m super-busy at the moment, so who knows, ’ Panio said coyly, ‘but come find me when you’re finished, OK?’ He winked. ‘We could have a glass of champagne, and there’s some fabulous blue-fin tuna downstairs. Endangered, but I won’t tell if you don’t! We could, you know, hang out for a bit if I have time. And there’s this one hot boy working up a sweat over the stove downstairs. Diego. Yummy. Kitchen staff are always fun to play with.’

  He reached out and tweaked one of Lawrence’s nipples through his T-shirt.

  ‘Mmm! Taut! And FYI, Carin loves to watch the staff get it on, ’ Panio added. ‘It’s big bonus time. I’m surprised she hasn’t mentioned it to you yet, but she’s been very busy with one thing and another . . . so think it over, why don’t you? We could, you know, book in a session.’ He giggled knowingly.

  Lawrence nodded in what he hoped was roughly the way a gay personal trainer would do when propositioned by a client’s butler for an exhibitionist sex display, though he wasn’t quite sure what emotion should predominate. Should he look flattered? Thoughtful? Blasé?

  To Lawrence’s relief, Panio seemed to notice nothing glaringly inappropriate about his response.

  ‘Well, no rest for the wicked! See ya later!’ Panio said, flashing Lawrence a smile and flitting off in the direction of the kitchen stairs.

  Lawrence crossed the hall, in the direction of the gym staircase, and then feinted back at the last moment, darting towards a door at the back of the hall. He had heard this described by Panio as Ben Fitzgerald’s study, but Lawrence would have known anyway as soon as he opened the door whose room this was. It had the unmistakably old-fashioned, masculine odours of cigars and leather, with a redolent undertone of malt whisky. Lawrence wrinkled his nose in distaste. Still, there was something poignant about this room, once you got beyond the smell of toxins. Lawrence was sensitive to auras, and this room spoke to him of absence, of sadness.

  There was a large, leather-covered desk by the window, which looked over the back garden, a small stone area planted with greenery which, Lawrence observed sadly, was manicured to within an inch of its life. Nature was firmly under control in that garden, taught its
place, which seemed mainly to be inside pots. Swiftly Lawrence ran through the contents of the desk drawers, the filing cabinet, but found nothing with any kind of medical reference. He did come across a section in the filing cabinets labelled with the address of the penthouse where Ben had set up Evie, and the sight of the address on Hudson, scrawled onto a label, actually made Lawrence’s heart turn over.

  There were no title deeds inside, of course. Just bills: electricity, gas, cable. Evie’s cellphone bills, and the statements from her credit and store cards. The totals were terrifyingly high. Lawrence closed his eyes for a moment. If he had ever doubted the fact that he and Evie weren’t suited to each other, this was the proof in black and white that he could never truly make her happy. After the deprivation of her childhood, Evie wanted a life of extreme luxury. She had been a rich man’s mistress when Lawrence had met her, and he had accepted her for who and what she was, because that was his central philosophy: people made their own choices, and only your own life was yours to control.

  He had never judged Evie for the decision she had made. But, looking at the evidence of her spending habits, he knew that he could never satisfy the desire she had for continual, lavish spending on unnecessary frivolities. Better that they had broken up sooner rather than later, he told himself.

  But the thought of Evie finding another rich sugar daddy made the bile rise in the back of his throat.

  He shut the study door behind him and ran up the main staircase, pushing all thoughts of Evie from his mind, focusing on the mission he had to accomplish. It wasn’t hard to locate Carin’s bedroom, which was in such a perfect state of polished tidiness that it might have been the most luxurious hotel room in the world, lying like a white sheet of snow, pristine, waiting for its next occupant. The sleek Scandinavian furniture yielded only clothes, exquisitely folded in cedar lined drawers. It was like a shop display, not a home.