Too Much Money Read online

  She reached out and halfheartedly picked up a place card from the table. Still lost in her own thoughts and grief for the past, she let it dangle from her fingers, a task forgotten.

  “Lil,” said Gus, “the place cards are fine. The table’s beautiful, and the white lilies centerpiece is a work of art. I bet Queen Elizabeth’s Easter lunch table at Windsor Castle is not as pretty as yours. Now, listen to me for a minute. Your son, Hubie Altemus, died of AIDS. He did not die of Epstein-Barr, no matter how many times you say he did. Someday you have to face up to that fact.”

  Lil looked squarely at Gus. “It’s Easter Sunday. It’s also my birthday. And it’s my last party in this apartment before I move to that God’s Waiting Room, as everyone calls it, over on East Sixty-sixth Street that my nephew insisted I buy. I so miss my brother managing my money. Young Laurance Van Degan always makes me feel like I’m going to end up in the poorhouse. He has too much control and is making me do things I don’t want to. Forgodssake, you know how much I simply can’t stand my stepmother, Dodo, and I didn’t want to invite her today to the family lunch, but young Laurance said I had to. As you well know, she’s twenty-five years younger than I am. I don’t know what my father was thinking when he married her.”

  Gus pulled one of the twenty-four Chippendale dining chairs away from Lil’s Easter table and sat down and crossed his legs, as if settling in for a long stay. He had heard Lil’s rant about her wicked stepmother getting all the family money so many times, he could repeat it word for word. He hoped the first guest would ring the bell.

  Lil went on.

  “Dodo was a poor distant Van Degan relation that I was responsible for bringing into the household after her father jumped off the Queen Elizabeth in the mid-Atlantic following a mortifying episode with a deckhand in the engine room that I’d be too embarrassed to go into details about. Her own mother was too drunk to take care of her, in and out of Silver Hill, she practically kept them in business. My poor father paid for all of her stays at great expense. As we all know, no good deed goes unpunished.

  “After Daddy’s stroke, Dodo pushed him around in the wheelchair, and when he became incontinent she didn’t mind cleaning up, and he married her without telling any of us. And then, he left her everything, including the Van Degan trust, which, by all rights, should have come to me. She only got the money for life, thank the good lord, but I’ll be long gone by the time the awful Dodo dies, and Justine will inherit everything that I should have inherited, and Justine has already inherited all the Altemus money. I’m the only one left out in the cold without anything. So, Gus Bailey, today is not the day to talk about the cause of Hubie’s death.”

  “You’ve put me in my place,” said Gus. “But, tell me, aren’t there other reasons for you moving from this fabulous apartment, Lil?”

  “I can’t walk up that beautiful stairway since the hip replacement, so I have to go out in the hall and ring the elevator man to take me up to the next floor so I can get to my bedroom. And it takes five or six in help to take care of an apartment this size. It’s gotten out of hand. But those are just excuses. I would hold on to this place regardless, but my nephew tells me I’m running out of money. If you had any idea of how those words terrify me, Gus.”

  Lil caught herself before she got too emotional and smoothed down the front of her skirt. “I’m going to miss this place, but I’m certainly not going to miss living in the same building as Perla Zacharias, thank you very much, with all her guards in the lobby, and her limousines blocking the parking space in front of the building, so that my driver has to double-park on Fifth Avenue, and I have to walk sideways between her Rolls-Royces, which are taking up all the room. It’s such a nuisance, especially when it rains. Really, the nerve of that woman. I cut her dead in the elevator, and she still tries to speak to me.”

  Gus leaned in.

  “Do you want to hear an Easter Sunday secret that nobody knows?”

  “Of course I do,” said Lil.

  “Not for repetition.”

  “You can count on me not to repeat it to a single soul,” replied Lil.

  “I just made a deal to write a novel based on Perla’s life and the tragedy in Biarritz … for lots of bucks,” said Gus.

  “Oh, my dear. Brave you. Perla’s not going to be happy with you. Don’t you ever worry about how people will respond?”

  Gus smiled.

  “All the time.”

  “Someday, when we have lunch, just the two of us, you must tell me about the fire at the villa in Biarritz. I’ve heard you tell it at dinner parties several times, but I think you’re holding back. There’s something fishy about that story, don’t you think? I mean, the Zachariases had all those guards, and there wasn’t a single one on duty the night of the murder. Pul-eeze. And didn’t I read in your diary in Park Avenue that the poor male nurse who’s in the Biarritz jail signed the confession in French, a language he doesn’t speak? Pul-eeze again.” As Lil paused to ponder this, across the apartment she saw her butler, Dudley, hasten to open the door to her first guests. “Oh, look, Gus, here comes Adele Harcourt. Doesn’t she look divine, bless her heart? Look at those high heels. Don’t you love it? Doesn’t she limp well for someone her age? She doesn’t look a hundred and four, does she?”

  Lil kept speaking as she moved to receive her honored guest, “that perfect darling,” Adele Harcourt.

  “Oh, I didn’t know she was going to bring Addison Kent. That’s her walker. He takes her to the movies in the afternoon. Adele loves the movies. The on-dit on Addison Kent is that he used to be Winkie Williams’s boyfriend, and probably still is for all I know. By the way, Winkie has cancer. Riddled, poor sweet Winkie. He called and canceled lunch today about an hour ago. Gus, be a darling and tell Gert in the kitchen to write a place card for Addison. You’d better spell it for her.

  “Oh, Adele, your hat is so marvelous. Perfect for Easter. Wasn’t the music heavenly at St. James’ this morning? Oh, hello, Addison. It’s so nice to see you. Happy Easter!”

  ADDISON KENT was one of those pretty society boys on whom fashionable women doted. He had only been in New York for five years, but Winkie Williams, who had been everyone’s favorite extra man for the past forty years, had more or less sponsored him, taken him about in the beginning to meet people when he first arrived in town from Grosse Pointe, Michigan, after having graduated from Brown University, which were considered good credentials. What only Winkie Williams knew, and not another soul, was that Addison’s family was from South Detroit, Michigan, that Addison had attended Brown Junior College in Willis, Michigan, for two terms, and that he’d been working as a waiter in a Red Lobster restaurant in Pensacola, Florida, when they’d met six years earlier. The Red Lobster was an unlikely place for such an elegant fellow as Winkie Williams to stop for lunch.

  Later, Addison told certain of his friends that fate had brought them together. Actually, Winkie had prostate cancer at the time and had to urinate a great deal. He had no intention of eating at Red Lobster after his emergency bathroom visit, but Addison, who had an eye for spotting class, put down the tray of lobster dinners he was carrying and followed Winkie into the men’s room. That’s where the whole thing started.

  Addison brought with him great looks and a natural aptitude for assessing beautiful things. It was Winkie Williams who helped him get the job under Prince Simeon of Slovakia, the head of the jewelry department of Boothby’s auction house on the Upper East Side, after Addison recognized a tiara worn by Perla Zacharias on the opening night of the opera as having originally been designed for Empress Eugénie of France. It was the sort of surprising thing Addison knew.

  The cachet of working at Boothby’s had proved to be an ideal stepping-stone into the right dining rooms of New York, where extra men who understood the art of conversation were always in demand. Lil Altemus, who knew a climber when she saw one, could read the excitement in Addison’s eyes at being in her house on such an intimate occasion as her family Easter Sunday lunch.
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  “He has a bad case of Astoritis,” said Lil to Gus about Addison. “He is simply dazzled by New York social life.”

  That Addison Kent had become such a close friend of Adele Harcourt’s had to do initially with Adele’s famous emerald necklace, which had once belonged to a czarina of Russia. Even at her ripe old age, Adele had not decided whether to leave the necklace to the Metropolitan Museum of Art or to the Museum of the City of New York. And so one day, a few years back, she had her social secretary, Emma, call Boothby’s to say she wanted to have the necklace appraised again, as if that might help her make the decision. As Prince Simeon was away from New York, attending a private jewelry sale of the Krupp diamond in Monte Carlo, young Addison Kent was sent along to Adele Harcourt’s Park Avenue apartment. Her butler, George—famous George her friends called him, who wrote out her invitations, menus, and place cards far better than any calligrapher ever could—led Addison to her library, where Adele was sitting on a chintz sofa reading Park Avenue.

  “I love Park Avenue,” said Addison.

  “Do you mean the street or the magazine?” asked Adele, playfully.

  “The magazine,” replied Addison, grinning.

  “Such fun, isn’t it? Sometimes I write for it. I bet you didn’t know that. Stokes Bishop talked me into writing about my hundredth birthday party that poor old Laurance Van Degan gave for me before his terrible stroke.”

  Right from the beginning they got along. The hundred-year-old grande dame, who still enjoyed a good laugh, was simply enchanted with the twenty-four-year-old Addison Kent, who, it turned out, told her he knew her first husband’s step-grandson from Harbor Springs, Michigan, where his family had “a summer place.” Addison always established a social connection, however remote, with any new person of consequence he was meeting. He didn’t tell Adele he had known her first husband’s step-grandson only for a seven-minute quickie in a cabana of the Harbor Springs Yacht Club during a dance, and that they had never spoken again once the zipper flies of their white linen trousers had been re-zipped and they had left the cabana separately to return to the dance, where their dates in summer evening dresses had been waiting to foxtrot.

  Addison was simply overwhelmed by the beauty of Adele’s jewels, especially her famous emerald necklace. Adele loved being complimented on her emeralds and enjoyed telling the many stories of its previous owners. “Barbara Hutton owned this necklace at one time. You’re too young to know who Barbara Hutton was, but she was quite something in her day. It was stolen from her in Tangier, where she had a house in the casbah,” she said. “I want to leave something to Lil Altemus, and something to darling Loelia, and to Rosalie Paget. Something substantial, like a ring or a bracelet. You must help me decide, Mr. Kent.”

  “Call me Addison, Mrs. Harcourt.”

  “POINT ME to where I’m sitting,” said Adele, taking Lil’s arm after Addison excused himself to use the lavatory and Gus stepped out of the room to make a phone call. “I don’t see as well as I used to.”

  “I’ve put you next to Gus Bailey, Adele,” said Lil. “I know how you love talking to writers. Don’t say anything to him that you don’t want to read later in one of his books or in his diary in Park Avenue.”

  “Who’s he writing about now?” asked Adele. “So many of my friends were unhappy with him after he wrote Our Own Kind. Do you remember when Dolores De Longpre walked out of the Temple of Dendur benefit at the museum because Mr. Bailey was seated at her table? It was the talk of the party.”

  “That sort of thing happens to him,” said Lil. “Listen, don’t mention this to him—it’s a big publishing secret—but he just signed a deal for a great amount of money to write a novel about Perla Zacharias.”

  “Oh, dear!”

  “Did you read his pieces in Park Avenue on the Zacharias trial in Biarritz? Believe me, there’s something fishy in that story. Ask him why there were no guards on duty that night at the villa.”

  “That Mrs. Zacharias sent me the most enormous orchid plant for Easter. Too big, really. Addison said it must have cost at least a thousand dollars. Why would she send me flowers? I don’t even know the woman.”

  “But she wants to know you, Adele,” replied Lil. “You are who she wants to be in New York. You’re going to have to send her a thank-you note for her thousand-dollar orchid plant. Next thing she’ll invite you to dinner and make an enormous contribution to the Manhattan Public Library, which will in turn get her invited to your house, Adele. Ask Gus Bailey about her. He knows everything about Perla Zacharias, going all the way back to her Johannesburg past and her first two husbands. Gus is the one who made her famous, some say infamous, writing about her month after month in Park Avenue magazine, after the murder in Biarritz. I tell you, a novel about Perla Zacharias, with all the things Gus knows, will be the talk of the town.”

  “You have me simply riveted, Lil darling,” said Adele. “Mr. Bailey seems to be everywhere. Now the big news is that he’s being sued for slander by that ex-congressman nobody ever heard of before all the controversy, Kyle Cramden. Gus said something about the disappearance of that girl, whatever her name is, that Cramden is supposed to have been involved with, that she was dropped at sea, or something like that,” said Lil.

  “Diandra Lomax,” said the butler.

  “What?” asked Lil.

  “The missing girl’s name is Diandra Lomax,” said the butler.

  “Yes, yes, thank you, Dudley, Diandra Lomax, who went missing, but Gus doesn’t want to talk about the lawsuit. He practically bit my head off when I mentioned it earlier,” said Lil. “He’s frantic about it.”

  “Yes, I read about that in the paper,” said Adele. “Quite a lot of money, isn’t it?”

  “Eleven million,” whispered Lil into Adele Harcourt’s deaf ear, although she heard it.

  “Dear God,” said Adele. “He doesn’t have that kind of money, does he?”

  “Of course not,” said Lil. “Oh, look, here comes Dodo, my dreaded stepmother.”

  “Happy Easter, Lil,” said Dodo, smiling and friendly, fully aware that she was disliked by her stepdaughter. Dodo Van Degan was not pretty. Nor was she ugly. She was pleasant looking. The help always liked her. She remembered their names. Even when she began to buy expensive clothes, she never looked stylish. She used to say she needed someone to put her together. “I bought this new suit just for your Easter lunch, Lil.”

  “Oh, green. Difficult color, green,” said Lil, waving to Janet Van Degan, her sister-in-law, whom she loved, who had just walked in the front door.

  “You always lift my spirits, Lil,” replied Dodo. The two women looked at each other with dislike. “Happy seventy-fifth,” she said in a loud voice. “I can’t wait to see you blow out all those candles.”

  A HALF hour later, after glasses of champagne and trays of caviar hors d’oeuvres had been passed around by Dudley, Lil’s guests were seated at her dining table.

  “Isn’t Lil’s table just perfect?” said Adele Harcourt, addressing her remarks to Gus, whom she didn’t know, while looking down the length of the table. “So pretty. So Easter, the whole thing. Lil’s always had the prettiest table in New York. Look at those wonderful flowers. That’s Brucie’s signature, those tangerine roses. Brucie is the florist we all use, from the Rhinelander Hotel, but you probably knew that. Oh, and look at these dear little chocolate Easter bunnies. So sweet. I always give these party favors to my maid, Blondell. She has so many children.

  “I understand you don’t want to talk about your lawsuit, Mr. Bailey. It must be simply horrid, being sued and being in the scandal pages of the papers all the time.”

  “That’s right, Mrs. Harcourt. I hope you don’t mind,” said Gus. “Lawyer’s orders. I tend to talk too much, and people quote me later, and it gets me in trouble, which isn’t good with this eleven-million-dollar slander suit in the offing.”

  “Good heavens, Mr. Bailey, I’d never want to get you in trouble, so let’s go on to another topic entirely,” said Adele.
“I am absolutely riveted by your pieces in Park Avenue about the Konstantin Zacharias case in Biarritz. Mrs. Zacharias just sent me a thousand-dollar orchid plant for Easter, and I don’t even know her.”

  Gus laughed. “People say she wants to be you.”

  Adele Harcourt wrinkled her nose dismissively and changed the subject. “You probably don’t remember, but I was at the table at the Temple of Dendur at the Metropolitan Museum on the night Dolores De Longpre walked out when you sat down.”

  Gus laughed again. “Stomped out would be more like it. Of course I remember. How could I forget? Dolores was one angry lady that night. She thought she was a character in my book Our Own Kind … and, well, she was right.”

  Gus was having such a wonderful time with Adele Harcourt that he decided he would share his recent news with her. It was just too good to keep to himself. With a mischievous expression on his face, he leaned in and in a lowered voice said, “Would you like to hear a secret I’ve been itching to tell someone?”

  “Of course I would,” replied Adele. “I’m mad about secrets.”

  “I just signed a deal with a publisher to write a novel based on a notorious woman.”

  Adele grinned knowingly.

  “Yes, I heard. This woman certainly won’t be happy with that bit of news. No thousand-dollar orchid plant for you, Mr. Bailey.”

  CHAPTER 2

  ON EASTER SUNDAY, WHILE LIL ALTEMUS WAS giving her farewell lunch at her twenty-eight-room apartment on Fifth Avenue, Ruby Renthal was the sole passenger, except for her manicurist, in her husband’s G550, which the international interior designer Nicky Haslam had recently redecorated as part of Ruby’s plans for her husband’s reentry into New York society after his release from prison. What she had learned during the several years she and Elias had been on top in New York was that there was nothing the old rich enjoyed more than getting free rides in a billionaire’s plane, and those European titles couldn’t get enough, either. Ruby’s manicurist, Frieda, had come along at the last minute when Mrs. Renthal, who was used to getting what she wanted, made her a financial offer Frieda simply couldn’t refuse, with her teenage son in all that trouble with the law and the lawyers’ fees mounting, even if it meant infuriating Lil Altemus, Rosalie Paget, and Matilda Clarke, who had their regular appointments on Sunday morning, when Frieda went to their apartments. Frieda could always use extra money, and Ruby Renthal was very generous when she went after someone or something she needed. Frieda’s life was overwhelmed by her son’s transgressions. She feared that prison might be in his future.