People Like Us (26 page)

“Riveting,” was the only thing that Loelia could think to say about Ruby’s life.

“Let me tell you one thing, Loelia. You see me do anything wrong, ever, you correct me. I guarantee you I won’t take offense.”

“Of course, Ruby,” replied Loelia. “Tell me something.”

“Shoot.”

“Were you the cause of the breakup of Elias’s marriage?” Loelia asked.

Ruby shrugged her shoulders. “They’d been together for fourteen years. That was long enough.”

Loelia stared at Ruby. The directness of Ruby’s answers to questions about herself always fascinated Loelia.

Ruby, mistaking Loelia’s stare for disapproval, continued. “Look, Loelia, I wasn’t the first little chickadee Elias Renthal had dallied with, believe me. If it hadn’t
been me, it would have been someone else. But I was the one who told him it was one thing to be the biggest fish in Cleveland, Ohio, where they wouldn’t even let him in the country club, and quite another thing to be the biggest fish in New York City.”

“Is it true you were a stewardess?”

“Among other callings.”

“You met him on a flight?”

“ ‘Coffee, tea, or me,’ I said. He picked me.”

Loelia laughed.

“I was also a hostess at Howard Johnson’s, but, for Gods sake, don’t tell anyone that,” said Ruby.

“Do you love Elias?”

“Sure, I love him, and of all the wives he’s had, I’m the best one for him. It’s a package deal when a young girl marries an older man. He has this talent for making money. I have this talent for spending it. We needed each other.”

“And if he weren’t so rich?”

“Would I still have fallen in love with him? Is that what you want to know?”

Loelia, embarrassed, blushed.

“Probably not,” Ruby answered. “But he is so rich, and I love him very much. How’s that for an answer?”

“Honest,” said Loelia, smiling at her.

“Tell me something about Mickie, Loelia,” said Ruby.

Loelia knew what Ruby was going to ask her about Mickie, but she was not prepared to be as forthright about her private life as Ruby was about hers. Ruby, studying Loelia, noticed the slight stiffening of her body and understood the reluctance it implied.

“Don’t misunderstand me, Loelia,” she said, as a new idea suggested itself to her. “What I meant was about Mickie’s career at the moment. You see, Elias and I are planning to give a ball, to show off the new place, whenever Cora Mandell finishes it, for about four hundred guests.
Tout
New York, as Dolly De Longpre would say, and we were wondering if Mickie
would be interested in designing it for us. I mean, you’re always saying how Mickie really should have been a stage designer instead of a shoe designer. We want it to be something they write about for years to come. The Renthal ball. I’ve been thinking of butterflies for a theme. Do you think that would appeal to Mickie?”

“Oh, Ruby, darling Ruby, I can’t think of anything more marvelous,” exclaimed Loelia, hugging her new friend. “Wait till Mickie hears! He will be beside himself. Fantasy, Ruby. Mickie has such a sense of fantasy. And butterflies! If you knew how Mickie adores butterflies! It will be magical, whatever he does. I can guarantee you of that. And everyone will come. I can guarantee you of that too.”

Ruby pushed back the sleeve of her perfect red suit and looked at her perfect gold watch, oval shaped with Roman numerals, that once belonged to the Duchess of Windsor. Ruby’s watch, although beautiful and historic as a piece of jewelry, was often inaccurate as a timepiece, falling behind twenty minutes every twenty-four hours, with the result that she always arrived late to her hairdresser, or for her lingerie fittings, or her French lessons, to the consternation of those poor souls who serviced her, but she was so abject with apology for the inconveniences that she had caused, that she was instantly forgiven, and her tips and her gifts at Christmas were such as no other client in the city gave. “Holy cow, I gotta get my ass in gear,” she said to Loelia. “I have a French lesson with Count Motulsky at two. I’m going to Jamesey Crocus’s lecture on Sèvres china at the museum at four. I have to be at Madame Orromeo’s cocktail party at six thirty, and we’re going to the opera with Laurance and Janet Van Degan at eight.”

The following morning Ruby flew on her husband’s plane to Vacaville, California. She told Elias she wanted to use the plane to attend an auction at a California
ranch. She said some horse sculptures by Frederick Remington were being offered, and she thought she might add one or two to the collection that Elias had begun for their house in the country. Ruby promised Elias she would be back in New York in time for Loelia Manchester’s dinner.

A car and driver waited for her at the small airport in Vacaville. A decorator friend of Cora Mandell’s had purchased two Remington horse sculptures from a San Francisco collector and placed them in the car for Ruby to take back to New York. She told the pilot of the plane that she was attending an auction but would not be long. In the car was a lawyer from San Francisco.

“Hi, Mrs. Renthal, I’m Morrie Sable.”

“Hello,” she replied.

“All the arrangements have been made. The hearing is scheduled for eleven. It’s about a fifteen-minute drive.”

“Let’s go,” said Ruby.

As the car drove over the dusty roads to the prison, Morrie Sable several times tried to make conversation with Ruby, but she was preoccupied with her own thoughts.

“Shall I send the bill to your husband’s office in New York, Mrs. Renthal?” he asked.

“Heavens, no,” she replied. “I’ve brought a check with me.”

“But I won’t know how much the tally is until I’ve figured out the hours involved,” he said.

“It’s blank, and it’s signed. You fill it in, Mr. Sable.”

“Okay.”

“Under no circumstances do I want my husband to know about this.”

“Mind if I ask you why you’re doing this?” he asked.

“Four years ago I sat in a car outside a church in Beverly Hills during Becky Bailey’s funeral, feeling too guilty to go in, because I knew that if I had stepped
forward when I should have stepped forward, what happened to that poor young girl might not have happened. This is my way of seeing that it doesn’t happen again,” she answered.

Morrie Sable looked at her.

In the hearing room, the session was already in progress. Lefty Flint sat at a table, with his lawyer, Marv Pink, at his side. He held a ballpoint pen in his hand and wrote notes on a yellow lined scratch pad. At another table sat the prison warden and two parole officers. Several guards from the prison sat in the spectators’ section, as did Marguerite Hanrahan, Lefty’s fiancée, who was waiting to testify on Lefty’s behalf.

When the doors of the room opened, everyone turned to look at the beautiful and elegantly dressed woman who entered. She carried an alligator bag with a gold chain. Lefty Flint, seeing Ruby, blanched.

Ruby walked past the table where Lefty was seated without looking at him and took a chair that had been placed for her next to the presiding parole officer. After introductions had been made, the warden called on Mrs. Renthal to speak.

“My name is Ruby Nolte Renthal,” she began. “I have come here today from my home in New York to plead with you not to grant Francis Flint an early release from his prison sentence.”

“Warden, I object,” said Marv Pink, rising from his seat.

“This is a hearing, not a trial, Mr. Pink. There are no objections recognized. Mrs. Renthal’s lawyer called me and asked that his client be allowed to come here to speak,” said the warden. “Go on, Mrs. Renthal.”

“I had a two-year relationship with Francis Flint that ended several years before the murder of Becky Bailey. On four separate occasions Mr. Flint beat me. Once when I tried to escape from him, he threw me down a stairway. On two separate occasions I was hospitalized as a result of his beatings. The latter time, Mr.
Flint, whom I called Lefty, broke my nose and teeth, blacked my eyes, and fractured my jaw.”

“Did you press charges at the time?” asked the warden.

“No,” replied Ruby. She opened her bag and took out a handkerchief.

“May I ask why, Mrs. Renthal?”

Ruby looked at Marv Pink and answered, “I was warned not to.”

“By whom?”

“It doesn’t matter now,” she replied, wiping a tear away. “The jury at his trial for the murder of Becky Bailey was allowed to think that her strangulation was a single isolated incident on the part of Lefty Flint in an otherwise impeccable life. This is not true. Mr. Flint is a classic abuser of women, and his weapon is his hands.”

The room was in silence.

“Are you finished, Mrs. Renthal?” asked the warden.

“Yes, sir, I am, except to say that I feel this man is a danger to women. I have seen him froth at the mouth in anger. I know how little it takes for him to lose control.”

Lefty Flint, breathing heavily, pushed back his chair from the table. The ballpoint pen that he had been holding snapped in two in his hand. Marv Pink placed his hand on Lefty’s arm in a cautionary gesture.

“Sit down, Lefty,” whispered Marguerite from behind him.

“Thank you, Mrs. Renthal,” said the warden.

“Am I excused?” she asked.

“Yes.”

Ruby rose. Morrie Sable rose. As Ruby walked past Lefty Flint on her way to the door, their eyes met for an instant.

22

Romantic longevity was never Bernie Slatkin’s long suit. He was used to the adoration of five or six women at the same time, in the compartmentalized way he had always lived his life, with no part encroaching upon another. Women who watched him on television wrote him letters, or waited for him outside the studio in the hopes of meeting him. Even women he met at society parties looked at him across dinnertables in an inviting manner, sometimes even slipping their place cards into his pocket with their telephone numbers hastily scribbled on them. He liked the chase. He liked seduction. He liked the madness of ecstasy that came with new partners. He liked not having to answer to anyone for his time and affections. His affairs, when he had had them before his marriage, were brief, mostly culminating after week-long love-soaked sojourns to tropical islands, when the sameness began to pall.

Bernie could not deny that Justine’s love had begun to bore him. He preferred the flippancy of Brenda Primrose, in the news room, with whom he had had an affair and with whom, from time to time, for old times’ sake, if they had both been working late, he still sought quick satisfaction. He knew that during their affair she had been seeing two other men at the same time, and he liked her for it because it showed that she played the game the way he did, for sex, not love.

At the bal masquè following the opening of the ballet, Bernie and Justine Slatkin were the guests of Elias and Ruby Renthal. Ruby, the best dancer on the small dance floor, could feel Bernie Slatkin’s erection boring into her. Looking up, she could see that his eyes
had the look of a man in the throes of deep desire. “Uh, uh,” she said, shaking her head in refusal, at the same time backing her pelvis away from him without missing a beat of the dance. “It feels good, Bernie, and I hear you’re great in bed, but I already got myself a fella. And you’ve already got yourself a lady, and I do mean a lady, in case it slipped your mind.” The music stopped. “Thanks for the dance, Bernie. I love to samba. Now I’m off to find my husband.”

That year Justine gave Bernie many gifts: gold cuff links from Tiffany for day, sapphire-and-gold cuff links from Carrier for evening, silk pajamas with his monogram over the pocket, a maroon polka-dot dressing gown, and writing paper with his name engraved in all sizes and shapes. For a while Bernie loved her gifts and was amused by her extravagances. In return, on Justine’s occasions, Bernie was never ungenerous, but often unimaginative, settling at the last minute for flowers, or a gold bracelet, when their apartment was already full of flowers arranged by Lorenza and Justine had more gold bracelets than she could ever wear. But Justine, madly in love, raved over his gifts as if they were precious and special, conceived only for her.

Bernie enjoyed Justine’s land of social life, up to a point, although it dismayed him that they went out almost every night. He also enjoyed the kind of sporting life that Justine’s friends led on the weekends in the country: tennis, golf, shooting. He enjoyed the kind of powerful people he met through his marriage into the Van Degan family, like the Elias Renthals. He enjoyed the admiration he felt he received from Uncle Laurance Van Degan because of the kind of money he earned, and the recognition factor he possessed in public. He was quick to act on any tips in the stock market that Uncle Laurance offered him. If he were to go into politics sometime in the future, which people told him he could, with his sincerity and his dimple, the kind of
people he was meeting and being accepted by were the kind of people to guide and finance him in his political schemes.

He could have been happy. But he couldn’t be faithful.

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