One Dangerous Lady (16 page)

“What makes you say that? Just because he's been married a hundred times?” I said facetiously.

Larry smiled. “I think old Max has a hidden life.”

“Don't we all?” I said.

Larry nodded knowingly. “Yes, but Max's is particularly dark, I suspect. You know the English. They always have the grisliest murders and the kinkiest sex scandals.”

“So which is Max? Murderer or pervert?” I asked, joking.

Larry chuckled knowingly. “Voyeur, one hears,” he said without hesitation.

Just then, Dick Bromire tapped his glass with his knife. I hated to break away from our conversation, but the room fell silent. Trish leaned forward a little with nervous anticipation as her portly husband hauled himself up out of his chair and stood with some effort.

“My dear friends,” Dick began in a halting voice. “I can't tell you how much it means to me that each and every one of you has come here to be with me tonight. . . . My dear friend Jo Slater has a motto, which is, ‘I may not remember, but I
never
forget.' Jo, if you'll allow me, that's a motto I'm going to adopt for myself from now on.” He took a deep breath and continued on in a stronger voice. “I'll never forget those who are here with me tonight . . . and I'll never forget those who are
not.
And to those who are not, I say,
‘Good riddance!'
So eat, drink, and be merry, because tomorrow it may be baloney sandwiches for all of us. Ya never know!”

We all laughed politely as Dick sat down, but there was a strange feeling in the air. I remember thinking at that moment, “It's not you are what you eat so much as it's you are who you eat
with.
” I coaxed Larry to return to our conversation about Max, and he told me that when he was living in London, Max had the reputation of liking call girls.

“ ‘Marries high, fucks low' is what they always said about him,” Larry said. “A lady I knew told me that among the cognoscenti, there was a joke about Max's ‘Taunton Hall Balls.' . . . Apparently, he was into orgies and used to have them regularly at his house.”

Clearly Max was a more intriguing figure than I had realized. But I was just as happy we had never gone to bed.

Whispered conversations continued around the table, an indication that the evening was never going to become less lugubrious. Fortunately it ended early, and Larry gave me a lift home, keeping the cab waiting while he escorted me to my door. He made me promise to tell him all about the trial, since he was not going to be able to attend. He pointed his right index finger at me in a very Larry way—that is to say, with an impish gleam in his eye—and said, “I'll call you the nanosecond I get back from Florida.”

 

Chapter 17

I
n the theater of social life, the opening day of Dick Bromire's trial was the hottest ticket in town. People were dying to see the show. Dick had personally made arrangements for his close friends to have seats in the courtroom, having privately confided to me that the humiliation was so great he couldn't bear for anyone but his oldest and dearest pals to see him under those circumstances. In other words, he wanted to be surrounded by friends who genuinely wished him well, as opposed to people who would dine out on the fact that they had been there.

No such luck.

Despite the freezing cold, Betty and I went to the courthouse together to give Dick moral support. Dick's entrance into the courtroom was dramatic. He looked pained and frightened, like he was walking a gangplank. Several of the people there had been at the party the night before. Betty caught sight of Carla Cole and Marcy Ludinghausen, whom she referred to as “Scylla and Charybdis,” sitting together. I wondered aloud what Carla was doing there since she wasn't a great friend of Dick's, to which Betty immediately responded, “Honey, this morning, Forty Centre Street is
the
place to be. Carla's playing the game now. You watch.”

During the recess, Carla made a point of coming up to me and Betty and asking how “dear June” was. I found her inquiry not only disingenuous, but slightly sinister. It was beginning to dawn on me that Carla Cole was going to be a fact of social life from now on.

B
etty and I went directly from the trial to the hospital to see how June was doing. Charlie was there, as usual, keeping a vigil at her bedside. His thin, lined face looked drawn and tired. We told him all about the Bromires' dinner and the trial, gossiping with him in order to buoy his spirits a little.

“I wish I could be there for Dick, but—” His voice trailed off as his gaze drifted sadly to June. “Oh—they found the car,” he said suddenly.

Betty and I perked up.

“Screw the car. Did they get the driver?” Betty asked.

“No. The car was stolen.”

“Has there been any change at all?” I asked him, looking at my poor, dear friend who looked uncharacteristically serene in her comatose state.

He shook his head. “I talked to the doctors. They don't think there's brain damage, but they won't know for sure until she, you know . . . comes out of it.”

“You should go home and get some rest,” I said.

Charlie shook his head. “No rest at home. Carla Cole's started construction.”

“Construction? It's only February, for heaven's sakes. You can only do construction in my building from May to September,” I said.

“Same with us. But the board granted her a special dispensation.”

“Why?”
Betty asked.

Charlie bristled. “Hadley Grimes. He's a stickler for building rules except when it doesn't suit him. He wouldn't postpone the meeting for June, but he's letting Carla Cole do major work off season. She's built a special freight elevator to handle all the debris. I get woken up at seven every morning with all the hammering and drilling. I feel like I'm living in the inside of a pinball machine. At least the hospital is peaceful.”

As Betty and I left the hospital, Betty said, “Well, I guarantee you one thing: Someone's on the take from Carla, and I bet it's that old Tut-tut Hadley Grimes.”

I didn't disagree.

When I got home that evening, there was a message that Max had called. I didn't call him back because it was fairly late in London and I didn't want to disturb him. But he called again at what must have been two o'clock his time. I was just getting ready to have a nice, quiet dinner alone in front of the fire—my favorite kind of evening these days. I was weary of social life, and with June out of commission, a certain spark was gone—exasperating spark though she was.

As always with Max, there was a vaguely seductive tone to his voice. He said he missed New York and he missed me and he was coming back to town in a couple of weeks. He wondered if we could get together for a drink, or dinner, “or a little something more amusing.” I intuited that “a little something more amusing” did not mean romance. It meant he was asking would I give him a party. When I suggested it, he jumped at the idea. Max made no secret of the fact that he adored parties—particularly those given in his honor. Betty was the one who said, “Somewhere someone is always giving a party for Max Vermilion.”

Max and I made up a guest list. He asked me if I wouldn't mind asking Lulu Cole. I told him I wasn't crazy about the idea, but since she'd been kind enough to invite me to the opera where she and I had declared a truce, I would.

“I'll do it for you, Max,” I said. “Just for you.”

“Jo, you are a star,” he said.

I suggested some friends of my own—several of whom he'd never met. He said he was delighted to meet “new people.” I thought of Betty, who was always saying how she couldn't stand new people because, as she put it, “You meet them, you get friendly with them, and then when they get indicted, you have to stick by them. New people today are riskier than unprotected sex.”

Fortunately, Max didn't have that view.

“I collect friends the way my ancestors collected bronzes—in great quantity, but with some discrimination,” he said.

We completed the list, fixed a date, and I told him I'd get right on it.

“Please wear your little pin,” he said flirtatiously.

“Of course—social butterfly that I am,” I said.

“Dragonfly,” he corrected me.

I
went to bed fairly early and was awakened out of a fitful sleep by the phone. I picked it up and said a groggy hello. It was Larry calling from Florida. I glanced at the clock—just past eleven.

“Jo, Larry. I'm so sorry to wake you up,” he said apologetically. He obviously wanted to talk.

“No, that's okay, honey. What's up? Where are you?”

“Palm Beach.”

“How's Lulu's spy?” I asked him, slowly coming to life.

There was a brief silence.

“Dead,” Larry said.

That woke me up.

“What?! You're kidding! What happened?”

“The Palm Beach police just paid me a visit at my hotel. I was supposed to meet him for dinner tonight and he didn't show up. I went back to The Breakers and called him several times. There was no answer. They found him and his car in a ditch.”

“How come they called you?”

“My name and telephone number and the details of our meeting were in his pocket. He was obviously on his way to see me when he went off the road.” He paused for a moment, then said, “It strikes me a little odd.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, Martin was on his way to confirm some unpleasant stories about our friends the Coles, and he dies. Our friend June was about to veto them from getting into her building and she winds up in a coma. Both car accidents. Maybe it's just my old reporter's instincts, but it kinda makes you wonder, doesn't it?”

I sat up in bed. “Oh, Larry, you don't think that Carla—”

“I don't know,” he interrupted me, anticipating my thought. “Right now, all I'm willing to say is that it's odd. Jeff Martin was a problem for Carla and so was June. Well, they're not problems anymore.”

“She couldn't have done it. She was at the trial today.”

“Money may not buy happiness, Jo, but it can buy damn near anything else.”

“You're saying she hired someone?”

“I'm not saying anything. I'm just thinking out loud.”

“You suspect her, Larry. I know you do.”

“Well, I do have a little motto, ‘Don't rush past the obvious.' ”

Larry told me he was going to stay down in Palm Beach for a couple of days to see if he could find out anything more about Jeff Martin's death and also to see Miguel Hernandez again. We made a dinner date for the Thursday he got back. Needless to say, I didn't rest easily that night. Though I was wary of Carla for my own personal reasons, it was hard to believe she was somehow responsible for June's accident. And yet, as I lay awake in the dark, unable to sleep, I wondered if Larry's instincts might indeed be correct. Was Carla Cole merely a social interloper, or was she a person of considerably more unnerving ambitions?

 

Chapter 18

T
he night Larry returned from Palm Beach, he took me to dinner at Pug's. Larry couldn't go anywhere without being recognized, and as we followed the maître d' through the crowded little restaurant, he was hailed by several friends and fans. We sat across from each other at a secluded table in the back room where we could talk privately. A waiter in a long, white apron took our orders. We quickly got down to business.

Larry had no further information on Jeffrey Martin's death, which the Palm Beach police were now treating as an accident. But he did have some riveting news. He leaned forward, rested his arms on the table, and said, “Jo, I'm taking you into my confidence here. I'm putting all this in my article, but I'd appreciate it if you wouldn't say anything before it comes out, okay? Do I have your word?”

“Of course,” I assured him.

He leaned in farther and said in a low, measured voice, “Courtney Cole has petitioned the court to have her father declared what they call ‘presumptively' dead.”

I was amazed. I remembered talking to Courtney at the opera that night and thinking how desperately she was clinging to the hope that her father was still alive.

“Why?” I asked, perplexed.

Larry got one of those gleaming expressions on his face that denote gossip of the first order. “Because her stepmother is attempting to plunder her father's fortune.”

I cocked my head to one side, uncomprehending. “Carla? How can she do that?”

“Okay, follow me closely here, Jo,” he said, using his hands to punctuate his explanation. “Nearly all of Russell Cole's wealth is tied up in a holding company in Tulsa called the RTC Corporation, of which he—Russell Taylor Cole—is the principal stockholder. This company has multiple subsidiaries and vast holdings in real estate and businesses all over the world. Now it turns out that Russell gave Carla both his general power of attorney and his durable power of attorney—”

“Why would he do that?” I interrupted.

“It's not uncommon for husbands and wives to give each other their powers of attorney. However, in this case, it could be catastrophic. Apparently, Carla wants to make a gift to herself of the shares Russell owns in the RTC Corporation. If she succeeds, it will mean that with one stroke of the pen, she will become a multibillionaire. Courtney's trying to stop her before she gets control of everything.”

I thought back to my conversation with Courtney Cole.

“Larry,” I said excitedly, “that night at the opera, Courtney told me that she thought Carla was up to something. This is it! She told me that under the terms of the will, Carla only gets ten million dollars.”

“That's right. There's a prenuptial agreement in which Carla waived her rights to Russell's estate. The will leaves everything to Courtney except the ten mil. . . . Remember how she got screwed by Hernandez? Well, she ain't gonna let that happen again. Jo, if this works, it'll be the fanciest finagling I've ever seen in thirty years of covering finaglers.”

“But, Larry, how can she sign over his fortune to herself, just like that?”

“She can do anything she wants if she has his powers of attorney. I'm no expert, but I think it's all perfectly legal. Naturally, Courtney's trying to stop it. But, frankly, I don't see how she's going to succeed.”

I slumped back on the banquette. “Jesus, Larry. Are you sure this is true?”

“I called Lulu from Florida to tell her about Jeff Martin and she told me. Of course, I had to confirm it with two of my Park Avenue Regulars,” Larry said. “And they say it's what's happening.”

Whenever Larry didn't want to identify a source by name, he would say the information came from his “Park Avenue Regulars”—a spin on Sherlock Holmes's army of urchin informants known as the “Baker Street Irregulars.” Larry's group included spies in high and low places—everyone from court clerks, who called him when there were interesting cases on the docket, to maître d's at posh restaurants, who called him when celebrities booked reservations, to socialites who called Larry just to gossip. It never ceased to amaze me how Larry seemed to know things that were going on in the city way before anyone else—sometimes even before they happened.

“Is Lulu upset?”

Larry looked at me askance. “
Upset
?! She'll spontaneously combust if she's not careful. This is her absolute worst nightmare—Carla getting control of her daughter's fortune. She's got a battery of lawyers working on it. She told me she's going to sue the board of directors if they let it happen. Some of them are threatening to resign. But we'll see if they do. Anyway, if Carla gets away with this maneuver, she'll be a multi
billionaire.
No one on the board will want to alienate her then. You know how it works in this town: He or
she
who has the most money wins. Isn't it
fascinating
?”

I loved the way Larry said “fascinating,” with a southern drawl and a big, impish grin.

“Oh—and there's another thing,” he said just as our food arrived.

“Jesus,
what
?”

“Well, apparently, there's something in the wind about his collection.”

“Oh, right. I forgot all about those glorious paintings. My God. They've got to be worth at least a billion.”

“More,” Larry said, as he cut into one of his miniature sirloin hamburgers.

I thought for a moment as I watched tiny rivulets of steak blood run out over his plate.

“Maybe the court will declare him dead and she'll be stopped in time,” I said.

Larry shook his head. “Jo, think about it. It's tough enough to get a normal person declared dead. But any court looking at a man who's been diagnosed with Dissociative Fugue Disorder—a condition where people can disappear for months and sometimes
years
at a time and then show up again . . . well, they're just not going to risk it. If she succeeds, if they ever
do
find poor old Russell, he'll be broke. . . . Six billion dollars . . . now that's what I call a motive.”

I cocked my head to one side. “You know, you kind of have to hand it to her, it's a pretty grand scheme,” I said with grudging admiration. “So do you think Russell's dead?”

“I do now,” Larry said flatly. “But let me ask you something else, Jo. Don't you find it odd that Carla married two men with well-known, diagnosed psychiatric conditions? Both very vulnerable men. Solitary men. Shy men. One dead. One missing. I find it really . . .” he paused, as if searching for the word. “Coincidental,” he said at last.

“Larry, are you saying she
planned
all this?”

“I don't know, Jo. You tell me.”

I thought for a moment. “Well, if the Manolo Blahnik fits. . . .”