Too Much Money Read online

  ALSO BY DOMINICK DUNNE

  FICTION

  Another City, Not My Own

  A Season in Purgatory

  An Inconvenient Woman

  People Like Us

  The Two Mrs. Grenvilles

  The Winners

  NONFICTION

  Justice

  The Way We Lived Then

  The Mansions of Limbo

  Fatal Charms

  PROLOGUE

  A FEW YEARS AGO THERE WAS A RUMOR that I had been murdered at my house in Prud’homme, Connecticut, by a cross-country serial killer of rich older men. Of course, it wasn’t true, although it was a rumor that lingered for a while: Gus Bailey was dead. There was indeed a serial killer at the time, who was very much in the news. He had just killed a couturier in Miami who was so famous that Princess Diana and Elton John and his future husband attended the funeral in Milan. I confess now to having been the person who started the rumor. I couldn’t figure out how to finish a novel I was writing at the time, and I wanted desperately to leave the next day for the Cannes Film Festival with Stokes Bishop, my editor at Park Avenue magazine, who assured me in advance that I was to be seated between the French film star Catherine Deneuve and Princess Olga of Greece at the magazine’s party at the Hôtel du Cap in Antibes. I didn’t want to miss that so I just grabbed the headline news of the murder in Miami and added Gus Bailey to the killer’s list, thus ending the novel, and I flew to France. Do I regret having done that? Yes.

  My name is Augustus Bailey, but I am called Gus Bailey by everyone who knows me. It happens that I am often recognized by strangers on the street, or in public places, and even those people call me Gus. I only use Augustus Bailey on my passport, my driver’s license, the covers of the books I write, my monthly diaries for Park Avenue magazine, and the weekly introductions on my cable television series, Augustus Bailey Presents, which I host. I thought it best to tell you a bit about myself before I get into the story that I am about to tell. It should be pointed out that it is a regular feature of my life that people whisper things in my ear, very private things, about themselves, or about others. I have always understood the art of listening.

  The characters in all my novels are based on real people, or combinations of real people, and they are often recognizable to the readers. Many of the ones who recognized themselves in the books became livid with me. If you could have heard the way Marty Lesky, the Hollywood mogul, who has since died, yelled at me over the telephone. There was a time when I would have been paralyzed with fear at such a call from Marty Lesky, but that time has passed. It made him more furious that I was not writhing with apologies, but the dynamic between us had changed over the years and I no longer feared him, as I used to fear male authority figures, going all the way back to the terror my father inspired in me as a child, but that’s another story. I’ve lost several friends over my books. One I missed. One I didn’t.

  Losing the occasional friend along the way goes with the writer’s territory, especially if the writer travels in the same rarefied circles he writes about, as I do. In time, some people come back. Pauline Mendelson did. She was a very good sport about the whole thing. Mona Berg did, sort of. Cecilia Lesky did. Maisie Verdurin adored being a character in one of my books and bought fifty copies to give as Christmas presents. Others didn’t, of course. Justine Altemus, my great friend Lil Altemus’s daughter, never spoke to me again. Only recently, Justine and I were seated side by side at a dinner dance at the Colony Club, celebrating Sandy Winslow’s ninetieth birthday, and we never so much as looked in each other’s direction for the hour and a half we were table companions.

  Not too long ago I had intended to give myself a party on the occasion of my upcoming birthday, a milestone birthday, which I must confess I never thought I would reach, especially in the last two years of stress and high anxiety. This was all caused by a monstrously unpleasant experience involving some monstrously unpleasant people, who had no place in my life and took up far too much time in it, particularly when the years left to me are dwindling down to a precious few, as Walter Huston used to sing.

  But it is a fact that the fault was mine. I fell hook, line, and sinker for a fake story from an unreliable source. I thought I had the scoop of my career, and I made the fatal mistake of repeating it on a radio show of no importance, and the consequences were dire. If you must know, I accused a congressman, former congressman Kyle Cramden, of knowing more than he was admitting about the case of the famous missing intern, Diandra Lomax. I made a mess, I tell you.

  I tried to distract myself from my troubles by focusing on party planning. When my birthday party guest list grew to over three hundred, and I was only at the P’s, I realized I would have to rethink things. I know entirely too many people. Although I have several very serious enemies in important positions, I hope not to appear immodest when I say that I am a popular fellow, who gets asked to the best parties in New York, Los Angeles, London, and Paris, and goes to most of them.

  I decided to limit my party to eighty-five people, which is the age that I will soon be. It was so difficult to hone my friends to eighty-five. It doesn’t even scratch the surface. Eighty-five, in fact, really means forty-something, with wives, husbands, lovers, and partners making up the other forty or so. There would be hurt feelings, to be sure. That’s why I don’t like to give parties. I go about a great deal in social life, but I never reciprocate. The spacious terrace of my penthouse in the Turtle Bay section of New York City, where I have lived for twenty-five years, has a view of the East River, and could easily hold a hundred people or more without much of a squeeze, but I have never once entertained there.

  I felt, however, as if I deserved a party. But it was not to be, as you will find. Things happen. Everything changes.

  I’ve noticed that concurrent with the growth of my public popularity, there is a small but powerful group of people who are beginning, or have already begun, to despise me. Elias Renthal, still in federal prison in Las Vegas as this story begins, is one of my despisers. Countess Stamirsky, Zita Stamirsky to her very few friends, is another who despises me after I refused to not write about her son’s suicide from a heroin overdose while he was wearing women’s clothes at the family castle in Antwerp.

  And, of course, there is Perla Zacharias, allegedly the third richest woman in the world, who had me followed by investigators trained by the Mossad in Israel who collected information that she later threatened to use against me. That’s the kind of person Perla Zacharias is.

  I have written about all these powerful people in Park Avenue, or in a novel, and earned their eternal enmity. Their time would come, I always thought. Elias Renthal knew what he was screaming about when he said, “They’re going to get you,” his face all red and ugly, as he pointed his finger in my face, only moments before he collapsed on the floor of the men’s room of the Butterfield Club.

  CHAPTER 1

  IT WAS EASTER SUNDAY. LIL ALTEMUS, THE OLD guard New York society figure, was having her annual Easter luncheon party at her vast Fifth Avenue apartment overlooking Central Park. In times to come, during her financial difficulties, Lil spoke of her Easter lunch as her Farewell to Fifth Avenue party. All her Van Degan relatives, several of whom she didn’t like, and some of her closest friends, like Matilda Clarke and Rosalie Paget and Kay Kay Somerset, whom she’d known all her life, were present. “We all went to Farmington, and we all came out the same year at the Junior Assembly, and we were all bridesmaids in each other’s first weddings,” Lil said about them every year in her toast.

  The star guest at the Easter luncheon was “that perfect darling,” as Lil always called Adele Harcourt, who was almost a hundred and five and was still going about in social life. “Adele was such a close friend of Mummy’s
,” said Lil, who was herself seventy-five, whenever she spoke about the revered Adele Harcourt. “We think of her as practically family.” Adele was celebrated for having given two hundred million dollars to the city of New York. She made appearances in slums to watch the improvements her donations made possible. She always wore pearls and furs on these excursions to building sites. “That’s how they want me to dress,” she said to Lil on occasion. She was used to being cheered by the crowd and enjoyed her celebrity enormously.

  There was also a small group of what Lil called her strays. Gus Bailey, a writer for Park Avenue magazine, used to argue that he was more than a stray. They had a curious friendship.

  Lil and Gus had met years earlier at the Kurt von Rautbord attempted-murder trial in Newport, Rhode Island, which Gus had covered for Park Avenue magazine. Lil, as the best friend of the comatose heiress, Antonia von Rautbord, ever since they were roommates at Farmington, was a witness for the prosecution. Gus was impressed at how unafraid Lil was on the stand when she was cross-examined by a ruthless defense attorney of national reputation.

  During a break, he introduced himself to her in the hallway outside the courtroom in Newport, after she had strongly disputed the allegations made by Kurt von Rautbord’s lawyer about Antonia’s alcoholism.

  “You were gutsy up there on the stand,” said Gus. “Some people get so terrified, they cry.”

  “Wasn’t he awful, that lawyer? So rude. Just who does he think he is, please? I certainly wasn’t going to allow Kurt von Rautbord to say all those dreadful and deceitful things about poor sweet Antonia after he lived off her money all those years,” answered Lil. “Antonia even paid his club dues at the Butterfield, forgodssake.”

  It was Lil who introduced Gus to Marina and Fritz, Antonia’s grown children from her first marriage to a Hungarian prince, with whom he became friends. It was also Lil who arranged for Gus to spend the night in the Newport mansion where the attempted murder had taken place.

  Gus often said that if Lil Altemus hadn’t been born so rich and married so rich, she could have been a very good detective. Lil was always thrilled when Gus said that about her in front of others. She sometimes bragged that he discussed all the murder cases he covered around the world with her. In fact, there were those who said that Lil Altemus was Gus Bailey’s source for one of his most successful books, about the shooting of banking heir Billy Grenville at the hands of his wife, Ann.

  On this Easter Sunday, however, Lil’s thoughts were concerned with her lunch party.

  “We’re twenty-four in all. I’ve put you next to Adele Harcourt, Gus,” said Lil, walking around her beautifully set table, checking place cards with the expertise of a great hostess. Gus had used Lil as a character in one of his society novels, Our Own Kind, and, unlike others in New York society, she had not taken offense, nor had she stopped speaking to him, as so many had. However, she did have one quibble with her character, as Gus wrote her. She insisted every time it came up that she was very definitely not the one who had said, “Better dead than Mrs. Fayed” the day after Princess Diana was killed in the automobile accident with her lover, the very rich Dodi Fayed, in the Alma Tunnel in Paris, as Gus had quoted her as saying. She had, of course, said it.

  “Adele adores meeting writers. Now, you must remember to speak up when you talk to her. She doesn’t hear well, and she hates wearing the hearing aid. She’s inclined to repeat herself a bit, but she’s divine, simply divine. You know, she was my mother’s best friend. They even worked at Vogue together back in the thirties. She’s going to be a hundred and five on her next birthday, bless her heart, and she still goes out nearly every night of the week, all dressed up and covered with jewels.”

  “I’ve heard through the grapevine that it’s your birthday too, Lil,” said Gus, teasing his old friend a bit. Lil also needed a hearing aid, but Gus wasn’t about to go that far with her, as she might get upset.

  “Yes, but we won’t speak about that, please.” She mouthed but did not speak the word seventy, at the same time rolling her eyes at the ancientness of the decade she was entering.

  “You’d never know it,” said Gus, although he knew for a fact she was seventy-five, the same age as Antonia von Rautbord, who was still in a coma.

  “You’re so sweet, Gus,” said Lil. “How are things coming along on that ridiculous lawsuit of yours?”

  “Don’t minimize it to me,” said Gus. “It’s not ridiculous at all. I’m living it. It is time-consuming, expensive, and extremely nerve-racking, and I hate to talk about it.”

  “I can’t imagine that awful man suing you,” said Lil.

  “The terrible thing is that it’s my own fault. I fell hook, line, and sinker for a fake story. I honestly thought I had the scoop of my career, and I made the fatal mistake of repeating it on a radio show of no importance, and the consequences have been dire. But let’s not speak about Kyle Cramden, or his terrifying lawyer. Even the mention of his name puts me into a despairing mood.”

  “Poor darling Gus,” said Lil.

  “I went to communion at Easter Mass this morning, a rare event for me, and prayed that something catastrophic, like a fatal auto accident, would happen to him.”

  “You didn’t!” said Lil, screeching with laughter.

  “No, I didn’t, but I thought of it. I don’t see a place card for Justine,” said Gus.

  He had listened while Lil spoke, but at the same time he was discreetly taking in the seating arrangement at the table. It was this kind of attention to the finer points that allowed him to write the articles that everyone talked about for Park Avenue. He couldn’t turn it off. He was always searching for more details to round out a story—or, even better, the kinds of details that might start a new one.

  “She’s not coming,” said Lil. “Justine doesn’t like you, Gus.”

  “I know. I don’t like her either,” said Gus.

  “She thinks she was a character in one of your books.”

  “She was.”

  “She thinks you went to Bernie Slatkin for information after the divorce, and he told you things.”

  “She’s wrong. I never discussed anything with Justine’s ex-husband. I wouldn’t put Bernie Slatkin in that position. He’s a friend of mine.”

  “She thinks you did.”

  “That’s her problem,” said Gus, shrugging. “Surely I’m not the reason she’s not coming today.”

  “No, of course not. She moved to Paris with her brand-new husband number three, Henri de Courcy, who paints fashionable ladies. Actually, he’s quite good. He wanted to paint me, but I said no, thank you very much, I’m much too old to be painted, and besides, Cecil Beaton painted me years and years ago, and so did Vidal-Quadras one winter in Palm Beach, and what was his name who was so divine looking who did that wonderful painting of Babe Paley?”

  “René Bouché?” said Gus.

  “Oh, yes. René Bouché. He was such a flirt. I can barely remember anyone’s name anymore, but René painted me too, and that’s quite enough paintings for this old lady.”

  Gus studied his friend as she moved nervously around the room, tweaking and straightening, trying to ensure perfection. Lil Altemus was tall and aristocratic. Most of her friends described her as handsome but not beautiful. Gus could see why a painter would be inclined to want her as his subject. There was something almost royal about her. She dressed in the manner of grand ladies of a certain age who once shopped from Miss Hughes at Bergdorf’s. Her clothes were both conservative and expensive, mostly in blue and black shades. As Gus looked more closely, he noticed a degree of melancholy in her expression.

  “Isn’t this supposed to be your last party in this apartment?” he asked.

  “Yes; that’s why it’s so sad Justine’s not here. She and Hubie literally grew up in this apartment. I’ve lived here almost forty-five years. Hubie’s dead, and Justine lives in Paris. I said to Justine on the phone last week, ‘Why don’t you fly over for a couple of days? It’s the last party in the apart
ment, and you grew up here.’

  “I told her everyone would love to see my granddaughter, Cordelia, and I even suggested they could drive up to Farmington and register Cordelia for two years from now. After all, my mother went to Farmington; I went to Farmington; Justine went to Farmington; and now Cordelia’s going to go to Farmington. I tell you, that granddaughter of mine is simply divine. I can’t wait for her to move back to New York, where she belongs. Of course, it seems there’s no changing Justine’s mind. She says she doesn’t want to be away from Henri, but I say it’s not as if she can’t afford a quick trip over and back. After all, she got all of the Altemus money when her father died last year.”

  Lil Altemus stopped fiddling with the table, rested her hands on the back of one of the twenty-four Chippendale chairs, and sighed, looking around the room, her eyes welling up with nostalgia.

  “Gus, I have such lovely memories here. Justine had her coming-out dance in this apartment. Oh, it was so pretty. The magic that Mark Hampton wrought. Peonies everywhere. Two orchestras. He tented in the terrace for the disco and lined the tent with blue and white toile. The oldies all danced in the hall, and Peter Duchin’s orchestra was on the stairs. So many violins. It was heavenly. Peter was so good-looking in those days. Dolores De Longpre wrote in whatever paper she was writing for back then that it was the prettiest party she’d ever been to.”

  “I used to read about people like you in Dolores De Longpre’s column,” said Gus.

  “And now you write about people like us, and not always kindly my friends say, and your name is in the papers more than any of ours.” Not to be diverted from her reverie, Lil continued.

  “Oh, Gus—if you knew how much I miss Hubie. He was always such a comfort in family situations.” Although Gus knew that not to be true, he said nothing. “If Hubie were alive, he’d have gotten Justine here for Easter lunch today. They were the closest brother and sister I ever saw. Damn that Epstein-Barr. I so wish they’d find a cure for it. They’ve asked me to be on the committee for the Epstein-Barr dinner dance benefit at the St. Regis Roof this year. I haven’t decided.”