SoHo Sins (18 page)

“So why do you put up with it all?”

“Because I can predict every move, I suppose. Credit Philip with consistency.”

“Does that make it easier?”

Philip was trailing after us now, within earshot, but his proximity only sharpened Mandy’s tongue.

“Easier to fight about, yes. At least Philip is true to form, especially about age. My husband is an utter lout, Jack. Boringly so. But there’s a certain comfort in that—a marital coziness.”

“I remember the feeling.”

“It’s like one long rehearsal—for what I don’t know. But the repetition, the scripted arguments, let me refine my threats and ultimatums quite well.”

“That’s one way to preserve a marriage.”

“Oh, who can say really what keeps two people together or tears them apart?”

Now, as I stood drinking with Hogan on the second-floor landing at MoMA, Amanda’s mother moved ceremoniously toward us. There was no escape. We were caught in a herd of soigné museum trustee candidates—mostly men who, like Philip, had risen fast on a single very salable business idea.

“Hello, Jackson,” Livinia said. “Let’s slip away from this dreadful company and go down to the garden.”

I wasn’t sure whether she wanted to escape Philip and his déclassé Claudia, or the newer cultural schemers with their designer-label tuxedos and second-place trophy wives.

When I introduced Hogan, Livinia seemed very pleased to learn that Bernstein had a man hard at work on the case.

“Are the police going to arrest Philip soon?” she asked.

“They can’t make anything stick,” Hogan said. “The Homicide boys are frustrated as hell because they haven’t got a good lead on anybody else either.”

“Such incompetence,” Livinia said. “You’d think any fool could solve something so obvious.”

“Any fool,” Hogan said, “is exactly what no cop wants to be.”

“And no wife,” Livinia answered.

I leaned between them to replace Mrs. Wingate’s drink. “You don’t think Philip’s responsible, do you, Liv?”

“Philip is a sneak,” she said. “But not a killer. Murder, I believe, requires standing up and looking your victim square in the eye.”

“Not the way it was done here.”

“No, not literally—but in principle. And principle is just what Philip has always lacked.”

We went down the escalator with Livinia and into the starkly beautiful garden. The night air was warm, and waiters went by with trays of hors d’oeuvres and wineglasses. Crossing the arched footbridge, we sat under the small trees, looking at the discretely placed sculpture intermingled with tables bearing white cloths and single short candles. Through the glass wall of the museum we could see people milling near the door, or being lifted and lowered on the moving stairs.

“I can’t blame Philip for what he says now, poor man,” Livinia sighed. “Shooting your partner must be a common enough desire. God knows I’ve had it. And I’m sure my dear Harry has, too. Who could blame him?” She looked away. “Occasionally I wish he’d worked up the nerve. Anything is better than being alive to bury your only child.”

I was out of my league. We sat quietly for a moment.

“Plenty of real murders begin with a fantasy,” Hogan said.

“Yes, I suppose,” Livinia replied. “But Philip couldn’t do it from three thousand miles away. Not himself, anyway.”

“And you’re sure he was three thousand miles away?” I asked.

“He called me the afternoon of the murder. He’s been doing that quite often lately, ever since his mind went to pot and he took up with that Claudia person. He rings up again and again to apologize for what an ass he’s become. Like a naughty boy who doesn’t remember his own silly plea from one time to the next. I suppose he wants absolution. As though I could grant such a thing—or would. All I can do is listen to his voice, small and whining and distant.”

“You can’t be sure how far away he was really,” Hogan said.

“I can when I look at my telephone log. He rings me on his new—what do you call it?—mobile phone. There’s a record of each call. That police acquaintance of yours, Mr. McGuinn, showed me a list.”

“And on the date of May fourth?”

“Definitely from Los Angeles. Something to do with signal beams and tower sites and whatnot.”

“McGuinn gave you a copy of the call list?” I asked.

“Please, Jack, don’t you think I can get my own account information from a telephone company—especially one that Harry more or less owns?”

Hogan and I left Livinia in the garden with several members of the exhibitions committee. Due to the size of her contributions and the importance of her private collection, Liv had been the head of that august body for the last decade or so. She was likely to stay in charge till her death, given the family connections and her spouse’s legendary financial exploits. Consequently, art people paid court to Livinia as they would to a dowager queen. Chief among her attendees, once, was the ambitious, fast-rising Philip Oliver. Marrying Amanda had guaranteed him a place on the museum board; leaving her for Claudia was a kind of social suicide. The split must have been a product of mad lust or his incipient brain disease—if there’s any functional difference.

Hogan and I went back upstairs to see how Philip was doing. We found him and Claudia exactly where we had left them, in the midst of a crowd grown denser as the evening progressed.

“Jesus,” Hogan said. “How can they stand each other, these rich people?”

“Oh, you get used to their ways,” I said. “If you don’t expect too much from them.”

“Like a conscience?”

“The wealthy have no shame, Hogan, least of all about money. That’s why they’re all so baffled by Philip and his accounting mania.”

I saw Hogan’s eyes dart over my shoulder, as if focusing on an approaching threat.

“Well, if it isn’t Jack the one-armed pirate,” a familiar voice said behind me.

I half-turned to smile at Paulette Mason, swathed tonight in a caftan of maroon silk. Each passing year has been a little bit crueler to the once-glamorous dealer, who now had a considerable quantity of fallen flesh to hide in those expansive, diaphanous folds.

“You two look like jackals waiting for Philip to stumble,” Paulette said. “So you can make off with the delicious young Claudia.”

At my side, Hogan tensed, no doubt ready to go at her like a mouthy perp.

“Relax. It’s nothing,” I told him. “An old friend with a bad sense of humor. We go way back.”

All the way to my gallery apprenticeship and many mornings, long ago, when I shared Paulette’s bed and her “breakfast of champions”—a blend of champagne and croissants, reefer and coffee.

“Hello, doll,” I greeted my former boss. “Sold any good fakes recently?”

She hooted. “Maybe, but I’ll never tell which is which.”

“You never did.”

“That’s right. It’s one thing to know the truth, quite another to share it promiscuously, don’t you agree?”

“Whatever you say, Paulette. I always defer to your expertise on lies and wantonness.”

“A wise choice, my dear. Superficiality like mine is underrated; it may be the purest way to live. Shallowness frees one from any silly pretense to meaning.”

“So how’s business?”

“Don’t remind me.” Paulette tossed a light, bright scarf over one shoulder. “Art dealing has simply gone to hell, Jack.”

“I see. And where was it before?”

She gave a smirk and a roll of her eyes.

“I swear people have no moral sense anymore,” she said, “no social finesse. They’re liable to blurt out their real thoughts at the most indelicate moments. Like our ridiculous Philip. He has the modern pathology. Just watch him.”

Smiling, Philip was moving about like a well-groomed automaton, greeting old friends and strangers alike. Meanwhile, Paulette retailed the gossip that had recently spread through the art world.

As much as Philip’s guilt or innocence, it was his idiosyncrasy that now fascinated our crowd. The tycoon had come to dread the very idea of indebtedness, even the momentary lapse between the time an invoice was received at O-Tech and a remittance was made by electronic transfer. This completely exasperated Andrews and his colleagues, Hogan had learned. Most businessmen—including my own wealthy clients—consider the standard turn-around interval a float period, when they can, in effect, use other people’s money as an interest-free loan. But not Philip these days. No matter that his payments were now routinely posted ahead of their due date, or that the company’s assets perpetually exceeded its liabilities. Nothing was fast enough or safe enough for Philip’s peace of mind.

“Can you imagine?” Paulette said. “Every dealer from here to Istanbul would kill to have him for a client now.”

In Philip’s personal life, she told us, it had gotten to the point where he insisted on prepaying—in cash—for restaurant meals, receiving his change at evening’s end instead of a bill. Otherwise, the minutes that the food sat unpaid-for on his plate, or in his stomach, tormented him like an interlude of theft. The anxiety had once caused him to vomit into a tableside planter at Nobu. Only cash could appease him. He had a vivid horror of checks and credit cards, with their interminable delays between purchase and actual disbursement.

“I could die in the meantime,” he said.

Claudia, for her part, was determined to keep anything else untoward from happening. That evening at MoMA, she stood beside her faltering lover, prompting him from time to time with the name of an approaching friend, intervening at critical moments with little potted scenarios that would give him something to go on.

“Hello, John. How have you and Daphne been since we saw you last summer on Taki’s boat?” Hints like that.

Such mental aids enabled Philip to muddle his way through a brief, light conversation. Sometimes everything came back to him perfectly, and he would be hilarious or charming or reserved, as the moment warranted.

It must have been an intriguing pastime for him, talking about events that were like episodes in a movie seen decades before, placing himself imaginatively in the narrative and hoping the plot would play out without disaster. Clearly a very sick fellow, Philip missed no opportunity for financial and ethical inquiry.

“Have you made the right investments?” he would say to all and sundry, while Carl Marks hovered wordlessly behind him. “Do you know what you’re worth? Is it more today than it was yesterday?”

The oddest aspect of his dementia was that it was not entirely unreasonable. Checks came in the mail—large denominations with no discernible connection to his efforts, or lack thereof. Financial advisers allocated the funds and made him wealthier still. To Philip, this was clear evidence that he was part of a vast criminal enterprise, or that some cosmic error was unfolding around him. Many associates, apparently, had profited from Amanda’s death. The money kept pouring in, as the attentive Carl continuously reminded him.

Thus, to his own ravaged way of thinking, Philip was caught up in a bizarre fraud, a vast conspiracy. Either he was a murderer or somehow he had been made a patsy, the Oswald of a domestic assassination—richly rewarded, so long as he maintained his oddball cover. Therefore his private inquiry had to be conducted in secret, obliquely. He sometimes called me, day or night, with stealthy questions. Who had gained from Mandy’s murder, and how much? Why did they choose such a conniving method? How had such evil thoughts gotten inside his head?

After a couple of hours, with Hogan growing restless, we left the museum and walked over to a new hyper-designed restaurant in the basement of the Seagram Building. You had to enter the place down a long ramp, for the visual delectation of your fellow diners. That was fine when you came in with someone like Laura, swaying atop endless thighs, but less of a joy with Hogan in a checkered sport coat and brown wingtips.

A row of video screens above the bar offered a time-lapse image sequence as customers maneuvered through the revolving door at street level. Each scene passed from one monitor to the next until it finally disappeared. My buddy and I sat on fancy stools at the bar, woefully out of sync with the young midtown pickup set. Hogan ordered our drinks—straight whiskey for him, gin and tonic for me—and leaned forward to study the videos.

“Cameras everywhere,” he said. “Here. In SoHo. All over the damn place. Just not in your buildings.”

“I told you my marketing strategy, Hogan.”

“Yeah, boho chic. What you didn’t mention is that your tenants have too much to hide. The daily tapes would look like a soap opera.”

“Fortunately you don’t need a video to eliminate Philip, not now. The DNA, the calls to Angela and Livinia—they clear him.”

“It still might be someone he sent.”

“I have to tell you, Hogan, I don’t buy that anymore. Philip is—or used to be—a sharp player in business. But, like a lot of smart guys, he’s a dunce at romance.”

“How bad?”

“He tried to tell me once that all his affairs just made him feel closer to Mandy. ‘Straying actually helps me realize how exceptional she is,’ he said. ‘I come back to her calmer and more appreciative, and ready to do whatever she wants.’ ”

“Christ. What’d you say to that?”

“I told him not to do her any more favors.”

We turned to our glasses. “Maybe you should have told him how calm and appreciative it feels on the receiving end,” Hogan said.

“Don’t be too hard on him. He’s just a regular guy, with excess cash.”

“All the more reason to straighten him out.”

I stared at my drink, not wanting to meet Hogan’s eyes. “You ask a lot, my friend.”

“Do I?” Hogan took a long slug of his bourbon. “Infidelity is a kind of murder, Jack. It kills your faith. After that, we’re not worth very much—to ourselves or to anyone else. Look what your wife did to you.”

Hogan never cared much for Nathalie, or for her French theory of marriage. I couldn’t really explain how dealing with that tall, intractable woman, fighting with her, tallying up her betrayals, gave me the illusion that, after all, I was not alone in the world. Or why, for the sake of that feeling, I was willing to pay an exorbitant price.

“Nathalie didn’t believe in guilt,” I said. “She thought it was a waste of moral energy. She saved up her remorse for more important causes. The refugees in Chad or whatever.”